INTRODUCING THE 
AMERICAN SPIRIT 



By EDWARD A. STEINER 

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Coun^sii ()/ The Surven 



V. D B'enner 



THE AMERICAN SPIRIT 



Introducing The 
American Spirit 



By 

'Edward A, Steiner 

Author of **From Alien to Citizen** "The 
Immigrant Tide" etc. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 19 15, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



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Chicago: 125 North Wabash Ave. 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
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m"^ I9!G 



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To 

Professor Richard Hochdoerfer^ Ph. D. 

erudite scholar and most lovable 
friend f this book is dedicated 



Introducing the Introduction 



" T^AS ist ganz Arnericanishr When- 

"^^^ ever a German says this, he means 
that it is something which is practical, lavish, 
daringly reckless or lawless. " i 

It means a short cut to achievement, a 
disregard of convention, an absence of those 
qualities which have given to the older na- 
tions of the world that fine, distinguishing 
flavor which is a fruit of the spirit. 

Many attempts have been made to en- 
lighten the Old World upon that point ; but 
in spite of exchange-professorships and some 
notable, interpretative books upon the sub- 
ject, we are still only the " Land of the 
Dollar." 

We are not loved as a nation, largely be- 
cause we are not understood, and we are not 
understood because we do not understand 
ourselves, and we do not understand our- 
selves because we have not studied ourselves 
in the light of the spirit of other nations. 

9 



lo Introducing the Introduction 

Coming to this country a product of Ger- 
manic civilization, knowing intimately the 
Slavic, Semitic, and Latin spirit, the writer 
was compelled to compare and to choose. 
Yet he would never have dared write upon 
this subject ; not only because it was a diffi- 
cult task, but because he had been so com- 
pletely weaned from the Old World spirit 
that he had lost the proper perspective. 
Moreover, of formal books upon this subject 
there was no dearth. 

During the last ten years, however, he has 
had the advantage of being the cicerone of 
distinguished Europeans who came to study 
various phases of our institutional life, and 
they brought the opportunity of fresh com- 
parisons and also of new view-points in this 
realm of the national spirit. 

These unconventional studies, most of 
which received their inspiration through the 
visit of the Herr Director and his charming 
wife, are here offered as an Introduction to 
the American Spirit, not only to the Herr 
Director and the Frau Directorin, but to 
those Americans who do not realize that a 



Introducing the Introduction 1 1 

nation, as well as man, " cannot live by bread 
alone ; " that its most precious asset, its great- 
est element of strength, is its Spirit, and that 
the elements out of which the Spirit is made, 
are so rare, so delicate, that when once wasted 
they cannot readily be replaced. 

As the sin against the Holy Spirit is the 
one sin for which the Gospel holds out no 
forgiveness for the individual, so there seems 
to be no hope for the nation which trans- 
gresses against this most vital element of its 
higher life. 

Inasmuch also as the Spirit is something 
which guides and cannot be guided, these 
informal introductions appear in no geo- 
graphic or historic sequence, but are neces- 
sarily left to the leading of the spirit, of 
which ** no man knoweth whence it cometh 
or whither it goeth." 

E. A. S. 

Grinnelly Iowa. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Herr Director Meets the 

American Spirit 

II. Our National Creed . 

III. The Spirit Out-of-Doors . 

IV. The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 

V. Lobster and Mince Pie 

VI. The Herr Director and the 

" MissouRY " Spirit . 

VII. The Herr Director and the Col- 

lege Spirit 

VIII. The Russian Soul and the Amer- 

ican Spirit 

IX. Chicago .... 

X. Where the Spirit is Young 

XI. The American Spirit Among the 

Mormons .... 

XII. The California Confession of 

Faith .... 



15 

35 
58 

74 
92 

112 

129 

147 
166 

184 

199 

216 
237 



XIII. The Grinnell Spirit . 

XIV. The Commencement and The End 249 

XV. The Challenge of the American 

Spirit 262 



13 



The Herr Director Meets the American 

Spirit 

THE Herr Director and I were sitting 
over our coffee in the Cafe Bauer, 
Unter den Linden. In the midst of 
my account of some of the men of America 
and the idealistic movements in which they 
are interested, he rudely interrupted with : 
" You may tell that to some one who has 
never been in the United States ; but not to 
me who have travelled through the length and 
breadth of it three times." He said it in an 
ungenerous, impatient way, although his last 
visit was thirty years ago and his journeys 
across this continent necessarily hurried. I 
dared not say much more, for I am apt to 
lose my temper when any one anywhere, 
criticizes my adopted country or questions 
my glowing accounts of it. 

But I did say : ** When you come over the 
next time, let me be your guide." 

15 



1 6 hitrodiicing the American Spirit 

** Why should I want to go over again?" 
he replied. " It's a noisy, dirty, hope- 
lessly materialistic country. You have sky- 
scrapers, but no beauty ; money, but no 
ideals ; garishness, but no comfort. You 
have despatch, but no courtesy ; you are in- 
genious, but not thorough ; you have fine 
clothes, but no style ; churches, but no re- 
ligion ; universities, but no learning. No, I 
have been there three times. That's enough. 
5 know all about it. Fertig !^'' And with 
that he dismissed me without giving me a 
chance to relieve my feelings, of which there 
were many ; although he took advantage of 
a minute that was left and told me that I was 
an Unatcsstehlicher A77iericaner whose judg- 
ment had been warped by my great love for 
my adopted country. 

Evidently the Herr Director reversed his 
decision to come to this country ; for the fol- 
lowing spring I received a cablegram to meet 
him on the arrival of his ship at the Hamburg- 
American dock, which of course I promptly 
did. The Herr Director and the Frau Di- 
rectorin stepped onto the soil of the United 



The Herr Director 17 

States with a predisposition to be martyrs, to 
endure the sufferings entailed by travel with 
as little grace as possible, and to suppress to 
the utmost all pleasurable emotion. 

On the other hand, I was determined to 
show off my United States from its best side, 
to woo and win the Herr Director's and the 
Frau Directorin's approval. In my laudable 
endeavor I seemed to be supported by that 
divine providence which watches over the 
whole world in general, but over the United 
States in particular. The weather was per- 
fect, the sky festooned in fleecy clouds, the 
air charged by a divine energy ; and when 
the sun shines upon the harbor of New York 
— well, even the most taciturn European can- 
not resist it. 

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin 
greeted all the good Lord's endeavor and 
mine, with an air of condescension as some- 
thing due their station. From force of habit 
they worried and fussed about their baggage, 
although there was nothing to worry or fuss 
about, for it was safe on its way to the hotel. 
They were shot under the river and the busy 



1 8 Introducing the American Spirit || 

streets of Manhattan and whirled up to the 
twenty-first story of their thirty-two-storied 
hotel without having taken more than a dozen 
steps to reach it. 

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin || 
refused to be impressed by the rooms as- 
signed them, in which not a single comfort or 
luxury was missing, and complained because 
they were not as big as barns and the ceilings 
not as high as a cathedral. The Frau Direct- 
orin eyed the bath-room almost in silence ; 
but she did wonder w^hy they put out a whole 
month's supply of towels at once, instead of ! 
doing it in the provident European way of 
one towel every other day. 

The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, 
like all Europeans who can afford to travel, 
are exceedingly aesthetic, and at the same 
time fond of good food, and their first ap- 
proving smile was won at the breakfast 
table, when they were each face to face with 
half a grapefruit of vast circumference, repos- 
ing upon a bed of crushed ice. Their smiles 
broadened when they had introduced their 
palates to an American breakfast food, a 



The Herr Director 19 

crispy bit of nut-flavored air bubble, floating 
upon thick, rich cream ; and, although they 
had made up their minds that American cof- 
fee was vile and they must not taste it, they 
could not resist its aroma, and drank it with 
a relish. 

When the Herr Director said : " Der Kaffee 
ist gtity^ I knew that my prayers were being 
answered, and that the good Lord still loves 
the United States of America. 

Most of us have shown off something — a 
baby, school-children, a schoolhouse, a town, 
an automobile, a cemetery. You know that 
feeling of pride which thrills you, that fear 
lest pride have a fall if it or they fail to 
'* show up." But have you ever tried to 
show off a country — a country which you 
love with a lover's passion ; a country whose 
virtues are so many, whose defects are so 
obvious ; a country whose glory you have 
gloried in before the whole world, but whose 
halo has so many rust spots that you wish 
you might have had a chance to use Sapolio 
on it ere you let it shine before your visitors ? 
A country of one hundred million inhabit- 



20 Introducing the American Spirit 

ants, of whom every fourth person smells 
of the steerage, when you wish that they all 
smelled of the Mayflower ; a country where 
more people are ready to die for its freedom 
than anywhere, and more people ought to be 
in the penitentiary for abusing that freedom ; 
a country of vast distances, bound together 
by huge railways and controlled by unsavory 
politicians ; a country with more homely vir- 
tues, more virtuous homes, than anywhere 
else, yet where the divorce courts never 
cease their grinding and alimonies have no 
end? 

Ah I to show ofi such a country, and to 
have to begin to do it in New York, beats 
showing ofi babies, school-children, automo- 
biles, and cemeteries. 

The Herr Director was sure he would 
hate our sky-scrapers ; he had seen them 
from the ship, and the assaulted sky-line 
looked to him like the huge mouth of an old 
woman with its isolated, protruding teeth. 
Frankly, I myself am not interested in 
sky-scrapers ; I prefer the elm trees which 
shade the streets of the quiet town where I 



The Herr Director 21 

live. I thank God daily for the men who 
had faith enough to plant trees upon those 
wind-swept prairies. They were mighty 
spirits who came to the edges of civilization 
and drove the wilderness farther and farther 
back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and 
planting trees — those men whom heat and a 
relentless desert could not separate from that 
other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sun- 
set and the oldest world. Determining to 
have and to hold it till time is no more, they 
proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy 
wedlock. A task which involved another 
nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, 
they completed with as little ceremony as 
that which prevails at a wedding before a 
justice of the peace. Those were the men 
who went among savages, yet did not become 
like them ; who for homes dug holes in the 
ground among rattlesnakes, prairie-dogs, and 
moles, and made of such homes the begin- 
nings of towns and cities. 

If I admire the sky-scrapers it is because 
they are an attempt on the part of this same 
type of people to do pioneering among the 



2 2 Introducing the American Spirit 

clouds. Public lands being exhausted, they 
proceed to annex the sky and people it, now 
that the frontier is no more. 

What the Herr Director and the Frau Di- 
rectorin would say to the sky-scraper meant 
to me, not whether they would say it is beau- 
tiful or ugly, but whether they would discover 
in it the Spirit of America, the daring spirit 
of the pioneers who built Towers of Babel, 
though reversing the process ; for they began 
with a confusion of tongues which outbabeled 
Babel, and finished on a day of Pentecost 
when men said : " We do hear them all 
speaking our own tongue, the mighty works 
of God." 

We moved along Broadway, pressing 
through the crowds, the Herr Director puffing 
and panting, the Frau Directorin doing like- 
wise. The Flatiron Building with its accen- 
tuated leanness lured them on until we came 
to the open space of Madison Square and 
they were face to face with the Metropolitan 
tower. 

The Herr Director said : " Gott im Him- 
mel!^^ The Frau Directorin said: ^^ Um 



The Herr Director 23 

Gottes Himmels Willen ! '* And then they 
gazed their fill in silence. 

I have never " done " Europe with a guide, 
nor have I ever had an American city intro- 
duced to me through a megaphone, so I 
scarcely knew what to say. 

I did not know the exact height of that 
tower, nor how many tons of steel support 
it, nor the size of the clock dial which tells 
the time of day up there ** among the dizzy 
flocks of sky-scrapers '' ; but I did know that 
the tower represented some big, daring 
thing, an expression of the spirit which could 
not be defined nor easily interpreted to an- 
other. 

After his first outburst the Herr Director 
continued to say nothing — he was stunned ; 
so was the Frau Directorin. We walked on, 
looking up, higher and higher still, until our 
eyes met another tower, the Woolworth 
Building — a shrewd Yankee five-and-ten-cent 
enterprise, flowering into purest Gothic. 

The cathedrals of Europe are wonderful, 
undoubtedly. Master minds drew the plans 
and master hands built them, slowly, by an 



24 Introducing the American Spirit 

age-long process. They turned religious 
ideals into stone lace and lilies, hideous gar- 
goyles and brave flying buttresses, aisles and 
naves and rose windows. Yes, they are quite 
wonderful. But to turn spools of thread, 
granite-ware, and dust-cloths into this glory 
of steel and stone is, to me, more marvellous 
still. The spirit of the pioneer cleaving 
the sky has become beautiful as it has as- | 
cended. 

We are worrying a great deal about our 
lack of sensitiveness to beauty and form ; we 
chide ourselves as being crude and unrespon- | 
sive to art ; we rush madly into the study of 
aesthetics and buy Old Masters at the price 
of a king's ransom ; yet we are not truly 
fostering America's art sense. It ought not 
to come in the Old World's way — by glori- 
fying dogmas and creeds, by petrifying relig- ' 
ion into buttresses and incasing our dead in 
tombs of beryl and onyx. It ought not to 
come with its mixture of paganism and 
religion, its armless Venus and its headless 
Victory. It should come first as it is com- 
ing—^with the making of homes good to live 



The Herr Director 25 

in, factories planned to work in, stores fit to 
do business in, and schools built to teach in. 
It is coming — yes, it is coming. 

But when our strong boys shall make 
filagree silver ornaments, carve pretty things 
on bits of ivory, or exhaust their energy in 
painting a lock of hair — when that time 
comes, we shall be an old people ready for 
our ornamented tombs. 

Next I took the Herr Director and the 
Frau Directorin through a portal flanked by 
pillars worthy to crown any Athenian hill ; I 
led them into a Parthenon in which Athena 
herself might have joyed to be worshipped, 
and we heard the echoing and reechoing of 
a chant which lacked nothing but incense 
and organ notes to make one think one's self 
in an Old World cathedral. The chant was 
not a Miserere^ but a call to entrust one's 
self to the depths of the earth — to descend 
into tubes of steel, beneath the river, and 
then travel to the fair cities of the living, 
throbbing, thriving West. It was a railway 
terminal without choking smoke, blinding 
dust, or deafening noise ; also without that 



26 Introducing the American Spirit 

hideous mechanical ugliness which Ruskin so 
hated. This was merely a place from which 
one started to reach Oshkosh or Kokomo, 
Keokuk, Kalamazoo, or Kankakee. Yet 
more beautiful portals never swung to mor- 
tals in their fairest dreams of journeying to 
the abodes of bliss. The Spirit of America, 
at last crowned by beauty. 

We reached our hotel fairly exhausted by 
our morning's walk ; but, after being prop- 
erly refreshed, the Herr Director ventured to ^ 
criticize. 

** Yes, you are a wonderfully resourceful 
people, keen and energetic, but chaotic. 
You take an Italian campanile and elongate 
it fifty times ; or a Gothic church, and atten- 
uate it; or a Romanesque cathedral, and 
support it by Ionic pillars ; or a cigar box, 
and enlarge it a million times. You put all 
these things side by side, and no one asks : 
Will they harmonize, or will they clash ? 

** Each man builds as he pleases, although 
he may blot out the other man's work and 
waste colossal energy merely to express him- 
self. The result is confusion. You can feel 



The Herr Director 27 

that unrest, that discord, in the air. My 
nerves fairly ache ! No, we shall not go out 
this afternoon. We must rest our nerves." 

The Herr Director always spoke for his 
wife as well as for himself, thus expressing 
the collective spirit of the Old World. They 
both retired for a long rest, while I was left 
wondering how to introduce New York to 
them in the evening. 

At five o'clock in the afternoon they 
emerged from their apartments, their wearied 
Old World nerves rested, and, after being 
stimulated by a cup of coffee, were ready for 
further adventures. 

Broadway at that hour of the afternoon is 
bewildering. The shoppers have almost de- 
serted it, and it is crowded by the clerks who 
served them, the cashiers who received their 
money, the girls who trimmed their hats, the 
men who cut their garments, the bookkeepers 
and the floor-walkers. 

Whole towns seem to pour out of the 
department stores and lofts ; the makers and 
menders of garments flee from the heart of 
the city, from this pulsing machine which has 



28 Introducing the American Spirit 

been going at a dangerous speed. They go 
from it eagerly, with a brave show of cour- 
age, as if the ten hours' labor had not broken 
their spirits or wearied their energy. To 
count the ants of a busy hill would be easier 
than even to estimate the numbers of that 
throng. 

They climb the steps of the elevated rail- 
way trains, and crowd them, and cram the 
cars until they fairly bulge. 

They lay siege to the surface cars, which 
merely crawl through the busy streets, so 
heavy are they and so closely does one car 
follow the other. 

They descend into the depths of the earth, 
and breathe the humid, human air of those 
noisy catacombs. They walk by companies, 
regiments, and great armies, dodging auto- 
mobiles which infest the streets with their 
speed and their stenches. 

They accomplish it all with so little friction 
to each other's spirit, with such a silent good 
nature, with such a sense of self-reliance, and 
with so little official machinery to control 
them, that even the Herr Director said: 



The Herr Director 29 

" This is wonderful ! " although he declared 
that he would suffocate in that throng, and 
the Frau Directorin cried out every few min- 
utes, " Um Gottes Himmels Willen I " 

There was an absence of politeness, but 
we saw little rudeness ; there were accidents, 
but the crowd did not lose its head ; there 
were discomforts, but little display of ill 
nature ; each for himself, and yet no clash- 
ing. The American crowd is more wonder- 
ful than the American sky-scrapers. 

At the Royal Opera in Vienna, the ap- 
proach to the ticket office is guarded by 
steel inclosures in which every prospective 
buyer is separated from the other, and one 
has to zigzag between these pens until he 
reaches the official's window. Crowding is 
rendered impossible, but, to make the obvi- 
ously impossible more actually impossible, 
there is the usual number of uniformed 
guards. 

Watch the American crowd — this group 
of unlike, self-centered individuals ; in a 
moment it is organized, it obeys itself — or 
rather, it obeys its spirit, the American spirit 



30 Introducing the American Spirit 

of self-direction, with its genius for organi- 
zation. 

To me, the American crowd is so wonder- 
ful because it shows this other side of its 
spirit. It is heterogeneous, like the archi- 
tecture of its buildings, perhaps even more 
so — if that be possible. 

Here are Jews from Russia's crowded Pale, 
where they had to slink along with shuffling 
gait and dared go so far and no farther — so 
fast and no faster. 

There are the Slavic peasants, who on their 
native soil, prodded by the goad, moved ox- 
like along an endless furrow, drawing the 
plow of autocracy. 

Next is the ItaHan, volatile and yet static 
with his age-long burdens, with his fiery na- 
ture cramped into his diminutive frame. 

Here is the Negro, the child-man, the 
shackles of whose slavery are scarcely 
broken. 

The Asiatic, too, comes with hardly courage 
enough to lift his softly treading feet ; while 
leading them all is this strident, giant child 
of the Anglo-Saxon race whose wind-swept 



The Herr Director 3 i 

cradle was rocked by freedom, and who with 
dominant will has spanned the oceans and 
crossed the mountains. 

Of these myriads whom he leads, some 
will be a drag upon progress, and detain the 
strong or perhaps retard the race ; yet they 
are trying to keep up, and by their efforts, 
by delving in the deep, by feeding with their 
brute strength our huge enginery, may 
make the flowering of the American spirit 
easier. 

Yes, the Anglo-Saxon is leading them ; 
but will he continue to lead, now that he no 
longer travels in the prairie schooner, but in 
the automobile — now that he wields the golf 
club and tennis racket, rather than the spade 
and plow on the prairie ? 

Will he now lead them from the breakers 
of Newport as well as once he led them from 
Plymouth Rock? 

Will he lead them from the exclusive club 
as once he led them into the inclusive home ? 

These were the doubts which filled my 
mind, but which I did not share with my 
guests as I guided them ; for we were to 



32 Introducing the American Spirit 

spend the evening together, and one needs 
all one's faith in New York at night. 

We spent the early evening hours travel- 
ling around the world. We went to Arabia, 
where dusky children from the desert play 
in the gutters of Bleecker Street ; to Greece, 
where Spartan and Athenian youth dream of 
the golden days of Pericles ; to China, with 
its joss-house, its faint odors of sandalwood, 
and its stronger odors wafted from the 
Bowery. We visited Russia, and saw its 
ghetto-dwellers more numerous than Abra- 
ham ever thought his progeny would be- 
come ; we spent some time in Hungary, with 
its Gulyas and Czardas. We went to Bo- 
hemia, with its Narodni Do77i ; to Italy, south 
and north, with its strings of garlic, its fes- 
toons of sausages, its hurdy-gurdy, and its 
rich harvest of children. We had glimpses 
of France, of its table d^hote and painted 
women ; travelled through darkest Africa, 
touched upon India, and then were back 
again upon Broadway. 

As in the sky above us the architectures 
of the world strive to blend and fuse, making 



The Herr Director 33 

a mighty new impress ; so below, these colo- 
nies to the right and colonies to the left, like 
the huge limbs of some ill-shapen monster, 
try to blend into America. 

What is it all to be when blended? 

Of course we went to the theater. We 
saw a German problem play made over to 
please the American taste. The Herr Di- 
rector knew the play almost by heart, and he 
nearly jumped upon the stage in righteous 
indignation when in the last act, where the 
author drops all his characters into a bottom- 
less pit and everything ends in confusion, 
the play ended in the conventional ** God- 
bless-you-my-children," " happy-ever-after " 
manner. 

We walked the streets of New York until 
past midnight, and finally looked down upon 
it from the roof of our hostelry. We could 
see the moon creeping out and shedding its 
mellow glow over the gayly lighted city. 
The noises were almost musical up there — 
like sustained organ notes — and we talked 
about the play with its happy ending. 

" You are right," I said ; ** that happy end- 



34 Introducing the American Spirit 

ing is foolish and childish. Things do not 
always end happily ; but this thing, this ex- 
periment in making a nation out of torn frag- 
ments, this founding of cities in a day out of 
second and third hand material, this experi- 
ment in man-making and nation-building 
must end well ; for, if it doesn't, God's great 
experiment has failed. Shall I say, God's 
last experiment has failed? You see we 
7nustn't fail — it must end well.*^ 

The streets were all but silent. From the 
great clock on the Metropolitan tower hang- 
ing in mid-air, came the flashes that marked 
the morning hour. Thick mists floated in 
from the sea and filled the narrow, chasm- 
like streets with weird, fantastic shapes. 

The Herr Director said good-night. The 
Frau Directorin did likewise. They said it 
very solemnly, as behooves those who have 
looked deep into the heart of a great mys- 
tery, who have felt the touch of a mighty 
spirit striving, struggling, agonizing to shape 
a new nation out of the world's refuse. 



11 

Our National Creed 



I 



"^HE Herr Director and the Frau Di- 
rectorin wished to go to church on 
Sunday, and after eating a piously 
late breakfast I spread before them New 
York City's religious bill of fare, bewildering 
in its variety and puzzling in its terminology. 

I gave them a choice between four varieties 
of Catholics : Roman, Greek, Old and Apos- 
tolic; more than twice that number of Lu- 
therans, separated one from the other by de- 
grees of orthodoxy and nearness to or far- 
ness from their historic confessions. 

There were Methodists who were free and 
those who were Episcopalian, Episcopalians 
who were not Methodists but were reformed, 
and those who made no such pretensions ; 
all these invited us to worship with them. 

Many varieties of Baptists announced their 
sermons and services, offering a choice be- 
tween those who were free and those who 

35 



36 Introducifig the Amei'ican Spirit 

were just Baptists, and between those who 
were Baptists on the Seventh Day and those 
who did not specify the day on which they 
were Baptists. 

We also had a chance to discriminate be- 
tween Dutch Reformed, German Reformed 
or Presbyterian Reformed, and United Pres- 
byterians divided from other Presbyterians 
(presumably unreformed) for reasons known 
to the Fathers who died long since. 

If we had been radically inclined we might 
have browsed among Unitarians, Ethical 
Culturists, and could even have worshipped 
among those who make a religion out of not 
having any. 

The most interesting column to the Herr 
Director was that which contained our exotic 
cults, those we have imported and those 
which prove that we have not neglected 
our home industry. 

It was disconcerting to me, who was try- 
ing to introduce our national spirit, to realize 
how varied its religious expression is, and 
the Herr Director got no little amusement 
out of the story I told him of the student in 



Our National Creed 37 

one of our colleges who, it is said, came to 
the librarian and asked for a book on ** Wild 
Religions I have Met." When the librarian 
suggested it might be Seton Thompson's 
book on Wild Animals, he said it was not in 
the department of Zoology, but in Philosophy 
in which the assignment for the reading was 
given. The book was then quickly found. 
It was Prof. Henry James' ** The Variety of 
Religious Experience." 

When we succeeded in rescuing the Frau 
Directorin out of the maze of Sunday Supple- 
ments in which she was entangled, we started 
in pursuit of a proper place of worship, in 
anything but a worshipful mood. I was 
bent upon showing that which is vastly more 
difficult to interpret than sky-scrapers, the 
Herr Director was doubtful that we had any 
religious spirit at all, and the Frau Directorin 
mourned the fact that she had to leave be- 
hind her so much paper which might have 
served such good purposes if she had it at 
home. 

Fifth Avenue recovers something of its de- 
parted exclusiveness on Sunday morning ; for 



3S Introducing the American Spirit 

although the cheaper stores are crowdingf 
upon those which never descend to bargain 
counters, this is not true of the churches. 
They still are in good repute, and await the 
stated hour of service on Sunday moniing 
without excitement, having advertised noth- 
ing, offering no ecclesiastical bargains ; con- 
tent to live as the birds of the air, whom the 
** Heavenly Father feedeth." The street was 
almost deserted ; here and there a taxicab 
darted on its way to or from the railway 
station ; the hour of the Umousines had not 
yet come, and the people who strolled along 
were evidendy, like ourselves, unfashionable 
sojourners seeking a tabernacle in Gotham's 
wilderness. 

Sauntering along the street was less inter- 
esting than usual, for not only were there no 
crowds, the shop-windows were all artistically 
curtained and tliere was nothing to see. The 
Frau Directorin did not like it at all, "for what 
good is it to walk along the shopping streets 
if you can't look into the shops? " 

" You see. my dear," the Herr Director 
remarked, " that is to help you obey one of 



Our National Creed 39 

the ten commandments which womankind is 
especially prone to break, *Thou shalt not 
covet.' Incidentally it proves that we are in 
a country in which you are allowed to do as 
you please every day and do nothing on 
Sunday." 

" No," I replied, " it merely proves that 
we are trying to save one day a week from 
the contamination of our materialistic ex- 
istence." 

" It merely proves," he echoed, " that you 
have inherited from your Anglo-Saxon an- 
cestors the worst thing they could leave you : 
their hypocrisy. I stepped behind a cur- 
tained bar this morning and found it run- 
ning at full blast. You evidently do your 
drinking in private on Sunday and your 
praying in public. You know we in Ger- 
many do the opposite." 

** No, you do your praying and drinking 
both in public, and both seem to be a part of 
your religion," I answered. '* Very likely 
you are right. There is about us this taint 
of hypocrisy ; but that only shows that we 
are a deeply religious people, conscious of 



40 Introducing the American Spirit 

the fact that our ideals are upon a higher 
plane than our performance. We are not as 
eager as you are to proclaim our frailties 
from the housetop. 

" The average American wants you to be- 
lieve him to be a pretty decent fellow till you 
find him out to be different ; while you Ger- 
mans make a virtue of a certain kind of 
brutal frankness, which is worse than hypoc- 
risy, since you try to make it an excuse for 
all sorts of private and national sins. The 
real criminal is never a hypocrite." 

I do not know what would have hap- 
pened to me if at that moment we had 
not reached St. Patrick's Cathedral. The 
full, rich organ notes seemed to soothe 
the Herr Director's ruffled spirit, and our 
discussion ended as we entered the welcom- 
ing portal. 

In a church which in all places and all 
ages remains the same, there was nothing 
for my guests to see or hear to which they 
were not accustomed. There was the priest, 
alone with the great mystery which he was 
enacting, and by his side the diminutive 



Our National Creed 41 

ministrants. The crowd which filled every 
available space in that huge interior was 
silent and reverent. Now the tinkling of a 
bell, like a command from Heaven, bade all 
kneel, and now the same bell bade them rise. 
The incense, the stately chant, and then the 
hushed, expectant throng going forward to 
partake from the priest's hand of the means 
of grace, which he alone could offer in the 
name of the one Holy Catholic Church — 
all this could not fail to impress us. 

Into the august and solemn atmosphere 
there came from a near-by church the chimed 
notes of a hymn-tune such as the people 
once sang defiantly when they proclaimed 
their religious freedom. It was a spiritual 
war tune which soldiers could sing, and 
strangely enough it seemed to fit into this 
atmosphere as if it were the one thing which 
the service needed. It recalled the self-as- 
sertion of the people before their God, their 
man God, who was born in a stable, who 
worshipped as He worked, and worked as He 
worshipped, hurling His anathemas at those 
who blocked the gates of the kingdom to 



42 Introducing the American Spirit 

them who would enter, yet did not enter 
themselves. 

Evidently the Herr Director felt as I felt ; 
for he whispered to me, *' The Reformation." 
When I nodded my approval, he said : " But 
see how unmoved she is, this rock-founded 
church. It will take something more than 
hymn-tunes to disturb her." 

We left the Cathedral while the hungry 
multitude was being fed with the Sacrament 
of our Lord, and our spirits, too, had been 
fed, although we were not of that fold. 

While the Roman Catholics were finishing 
their worship, the Protestants were making 
ready to begin. The first bells had chimed 
appealingly, not commandingly, and a thin 
stream of worshippers appeared on the 
Avenue, growing thinner as it divided, en- 
tering one or the other of those edifices 
where men were to worship according to 
the dictates of their conscience, their taste, 
or their social position. 

Many strangers, like ourselves, were look- 
ing critically at the church bulletins as 
yesterday we had looked into the show 



Our National Creed 43 

windows, and it was the Frau Directorin 
who said she felt as if she were going shop- 
ping for religion. 

The Herr Director said that he had no 
objection to our inventing or importing as 
many religions as we pleased; but he did 
object to our exporting any, for we were 
making the task of regulating and control- 
ling them very difficult. Moreover he did 
not see how we could develop any kind of 
common, national ideals with such a con- 
fusion of religions. " You have, or pretend 
to have, a democratic government, and 
your strongest church is monarchic to the 
core." 

I had to admit that religiously we are a 
very chaotic people, and that we are daily 
adding to that chaos ; yet these facts might 
prove what I had been trying to make clear 
to him : That this is fundamentally a religious 
country, and that as a whole we are the most 
religious people in the world. I supported 
this statement by quoting a good German 
authority, the late Prof. Karl Lamprecht, 
who thinks we have a great future as a 



44 Introducing the American Spirit 

people, because we are ** capable of religious 
improvement." 

** Improvement ! " The Herr Director 
sniffed derisively. ** Wherever I look I see 
improvements : churches turned into theaters, 
theaters into churches, and residences which 
are still perfectly good turned into sky- 
scrapers. Chaos is not an improvement 
upon order. Nothing is finished, nothing 
complete, not even your religion." 

Just then we were compelled to pass along 
a wooden walk from which we looked into 
a canyon blasted out of the rock, upon which 
still stood the foundation of the house which 
was being turned into a sky-scraper. 

** You see, that is the way we improve ; 
we go deeper each time," I remarked. 

"But in religion," the Herr Director re- 
torted, " you do not go deeper, you go 
higher, and that is no improvement." 

For the second time the chimes were 
pealing, and we entered a sanctuary of 
friendly yet dignified English Gothic. An 
usher, who looked very American and well 
fed and out of place, guided us to a pew 



Our National Creed 45 

in the more than half empty church, from 
which nothing was missing in the way of 
ecclesiastical furnishings. One thing it 
lacked and that no architect can build and 
no money can buy — Spirit. 

The organ was played by a master, the 
processional was splendidly staged, the rector 
looked prosperously pious, prayers were read 
and confessions uttered without any dis- 
quieting, spiritual agony, and the anthems 
were correctly sung by the picturesque boys' 
choir. The curate preached a sermon on 
manliness ; a sermon so thin and emasculated 
that even the Frau Directorin, whose English 
is limited, could understand it, and said she 
would like to come again " for the good 
English.'* 

I left the church deeply disappointed, and 
to the Herr Director's taunts about "improve- 
ments " I did not reply, realizing more than 
ever how difficult and dangerous is this task 
of introducing the Spirit, especially when 
one goes to church in the spirit of pride, 
rather than in the spirit of meekness. 

No clergyman can spoil the whole of Sun- 



46 Introducing the American Spirit 

day, for there is always the dinner, and having 
found a table d'hote in harmony with the 
Herr Director's national and religious ideals, 
we continued our discussion somewhat fit- 
fully, if, at times, rather vehemently. 

One of the things the Herr Director missed 
in the church where we tried to worship was 
reverence. He missed it everywhere and 
thought it due to the fact that we do not 
teach religion in the public schools. 

This was rather amusing to me, for just 
prior to that statement he had told me of one 
of his nephews who, upon approaching his 
final examinations, said : " If it were not for 
this accursed religion I could get through 
without trouble ; " and I called his attention 
to the fact that although I had no difficulty 
with my " exams " in religion, invariably hav- 
ing an '' Atisgezeichnet!' which is equivalent 
to an A, I was always '' Schlecht " in conduct. 

I had found religious instruction a very 
irreligious procedure, for the man who taught 
it was irreligious enough to whip me so that 
I could not lie upon my back for a week, 
the cause being that I would not say yes to 



Our National Creed 47 

his credo. Moreover I told the Herr Director 
I thought all religious instruction irreligious 
which did not teach the child its whole duty 
to society, but taught religion from only the 
narrowing racial or sectarian standpoint. 

Religion, I pointed out to him, can after all 
not be taught ; it has to be caught. It is a 
contagion which comes from a spiritual per- 
sonality, and our public schools are not relig- 
ious or irreligious because certain subjects 
are found or not found in their curricula, but 
because the teachers have this spiritual per- 
sonality or lack it. I am convinced that this 
ethical quality predominates in our public 
schools, not only because so many of our 
teachers are women, but because we are 
fundamentally a religious people. 

At this point I became conscious that the 
attention of the Herr Director and the Frau 
Directorin had flagged ; for their response to 
my homily was an eloquent tribute to the 
tenderness of the breast of a Long Island 
duck, which they had been enjoying while I 
talked. As they were consequently in a 
lenient mood towards the whole world and 



48 Introducing the American Spirit 

therefore the United States, I renewed my 
laudable and difficult effort, and, as is often 
best, through the medium of a story. 

At the time the elective system was intro- 
duced into Harvard University, attendance 
upon chapel was made voluntary. " I under- 
stand," said a severe critic of this procedure, 
" that you have made God elective in your 
college." 

*'No," replied the astute president, "I un- 
derstand that God has made Himself elective 
everywhere." 

The point of my story was lost upon both 
my guests. When I paused, the Frau Di- 
rectorin asked me how it was possible to 
serve so lavish a bill of fare for so little 
money, and the Herr Director asked the 
waiter why they called this a Long Island 
duck when the portions were so short. Thus 
the conviction was forced upon me that our 
environment was not conducive to the dis- 
cussion of the American Spirit and that I 
must await a more auspicious occasion. 

Late in the afternoon that occasion came ; 
not on Fifth Avenue but on one of those 



Our National Creed 49 

streets where churches are fewest and hu- 
manity thickest; where Sunday brings lib- 
eration from toil, where cleanliness and 
godliness have an equally difBcult task in 
coming or abiding ; where nations and races 
must mingle and cannot easily blend, where 
the America which is to be is in the making, 
and where the Spirit must manifest itself if 
we are to be a nation with common ideals. 

I like to take my friends to the East Side 
of New York City. I glory in its self-respect, 
its brave struggle against poverty and dis- 
ease, its bright children filling all the avail- 
able space and asserting their childhood by 
playing in the busy streets, defying its noisy 
traffic. They make of each hurdy-gurdy the 
center of a great festival, dancing as the elves 
are said to dance, because it is their nature to. 

I like to point out the faces of Patriarchs, 
Prophets and Madonnas — faces seamed by 
care and sorrow, yet lighted by a divine radi- 
ance and as unconscious of it as were those 
upon whom it shone in such fullness on that 
great East Side of the Universe which we 
now call the Holy Land. 



5© Introducing the American Spirit 

I like to have my friends meet my East 
Side friends, the young working girls, who 
dress in good taste, help support a family, 
and maintain an unstained character in spite 
of small wages and the temptations of a great 
city. I like them to meet the growing boys 
who are hungry for the best the city holds, 
and who dream the dream of making the 
East Side in particular, and New York in 
general, a better place in which to live. 

I am never ashamed to take my friends 
into the tenement houses, except as I am 
ashamed that they exist at all, with their 
stenches and the dearly bought space with 
twenty-four hours of darkness and no free 
access of air. Of the people who live within 
I am never ashamed, for they are the brave 
ones, to whom labor is prayer, and living a 
sacrifice. I like best to show off the East 
Side of New York on Sunday, for here it is 
most welcomed with its respite from labor, its 
chance at clean clothes, its opportunity to 
visit and be again something more than a 
machine. 

On Fifth Avenue the Sabbath is made for 



Our National Creed 5 1 

the few, on the East Side it is made for the 
many; on Fifth Avenue God seems hard to 
find, on the East Side He comes down upon 
the street. They are indeed worse than infi- 
dels who do not feel His Spirit brooding over 
the crowd, and His guardian angels watch- 
ing over those children — else how could they 
survive? Best of all I know where those 
Angels live, and it is there I took the Herr 
Director and the Frau Directorin ; I was sure 
they would never leave the place doubting 
that we are a religious people. Evidently 
the children also knew where their Angels 
live for the place was in a state of siege. It 
is not strange that they knew, for their an- 
cestors had walked and talked with angels, 
and they were not yet old enough to have 
lost the faith of their fathers. Troops of chil- 
dren there were ; mere children carrying chil- 
dren, and where there was an only child, 
which is rare on the East Side, it was brought 
by a grandfather and grandmother, children 
themselves now, and old enough to again 
believe in angels. 

There were flowers in the room and they 



52 Introducing the American Spirit 

were for the children ; bowers of roses, red 
roses, wafting their incense and driving out 
the mouldy, tenement house air which clung 
to the little ones. There was music, and 
they sang — sang as I know God wanted 
them to sing — gay, happy songs, which 
seem to be denied the children who sing in 
the churches. 

How I wished that the picturesque little 
choir boys on Fifth Avenue, who sang 
sixteenth century music and Augustinian 
theology, might have had a chance to sing 
as those East Side children sang— -full 
throated, lustily, joyously; songs which made 
them shiver from very joy, and which made 
the Frau Directorin weep copiously. 

How I wished that the priest who chanted 
Psalms in Latin, and the other priest who 
intoned them in English as dead as Latin, 
could have been there and have heard those 
children recite the same Psalms, in East Side 
English. Yes, I have often wished that David 
himself might hear them ; I am sure he would 
be proud that he had a share in writing them, 
even as the priests might be ashamed that 



Our National Creed 53 

they had never known just what precious 
reading they are. 

No one preached to the children although 
they heard the good tidings, and no one told 
them to be good although they were given a 
chance to know how good God is, when men 
give Him a chance. 

There was a sacrament^ a holy one ; roses 
were given the children, and the Angels who 
gave them shed their blood, for the roses had 
thorns. The next week the children were to 
be taken where the roses grew, and they 
would see that 

*' A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot I 
Rose plot, 
Fringed pool, 
Fern'd grot — 
The veriest school 
Of Peace:—" 

But they would not have to see the garden 
to know that God is. 

We broke bread with the Angels and 
looked into their joyously weary faces, and 
then we talked about the very thing I wanted 
my guests to know, namely: That underneath 
all our religious or rather credal chaos, we 



54 Introducing the American Spirit 

have a national creed if not a national 
religion. 

The Herr Director suggested that the 
fundamental doctrine of our creed is ** in 
gold we trust," and then he began a disserta- 
tion upon our national materialism. 

Perhaps so, I conceded ; but I doubted 
that we are more materialistic than the 
people of the older world, in fact I was in- 
clined to believe that we are less so ; which 
of course the Herr Director stoutly denied, 
and I as stoutly affirmed. In justice to my- 
self I must say that when my country's 
honor is not at stake I am less dogmatic. 

*' Perhaps we are equally materialistic," 
I continued, **but we are certainly more 
generous. We make money faster than 
the people of the Old World, but we also 
give it away faster, and I believe that there 
is no country in which there is such a con- 
tempt for the merely rich man." 

"I suppose the second article in your 
national creed," the Herr Director inter- 
rupted, " is that you are the biggest country 
and the best people under the Sun. 



Our National Creed 55 

" If I were suggesting a motto for a new 
coinage I would put on one side of it * In 
Gold We Trust/ and on the other *The 
Biggest and The Best.' " 

Ignoring this somewhat merited slur I 
said : " The first and only doctrine of our 
national creed which we have as yet formu- 
lated is that we have a great national 
destiny." 

At that the Herr Director jumped excitedly 
from his seat, and said somewhat sneeringly, 
" Oh, you mean you have a place under the 
Sun. All nations have such a creed, but 
when we Germans try to realize it, you call 
us a menace to civilization." 

It was a tense moment in my relationship 
to my guests, but I ventured to say : ** We 
have a better reason for the faith which is in 
us than most other nations, for we are trying 
to realize it without killing off other people. 
In fact we are trying to realize it at a greater 
hazard than that of being conquered by an 
alien enemy. We are keeping open these 
doors which have swung both ways freely, 
for nearly three hundred years, and your 



56 Introducing the American Spirit 

Old World weary ones have been coming ; 
bringing their traditions, their ideals, their 
worn out faiths and their heaped up wrath. 
We did not forbid them ; they have come to 
our towns, our schools, our homes, they are 
here for better for worse, and we cannot 
divorce them, or drive them away. 

" Yes," I continued, much to the discom- 
fiture of the Herr Director, ** we have a 
meaning to the Old World, a larger mean- 
ing than you think. We have a place under 
the Sun, not to satisfy national ambitions; 
but to keep alive faith in humanity." 

The Angels around the table were dis- 
quieted by our vehemence, the Frau Di- 
rectorin urged that it was growing late, and 
we left that center of quiet which we had so 
disturbed, to return to our hotel. We en- 
tered a street car crowded beyond its capac- 
ity by burly Irishmen the worse for liquor, 
good-natured Slavs none the better for it, 
aggressive looking Russian Jews and sleek 
Chinamen. There were mothers with their 
crying babies, and thoughtless boys and 
girls chewing gum most viciously. After 



Our National Creed ^y 

the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin 
had been jostled unmercifully, we left the 
uncomfortable car, and when we were again 
breathing unpolluted air the Herr Director 
asked quizzically : 

** Do you still believe in humanity ? " 
Boldly and bravely I answered : ** Yes, I 
believe," and lifting my face to the stars I 
whispered : ** Lord, help my unbelief." 



Ill 

The Spirit Out-of-Doors 

MUCH to my regret the Herr Di- 
rector did not sleep well that 
second night in the United 
States. His nerves had suffered from those 
first thronging impressions, he looked pale 
and was decidedly irritable ; "for how could 
a man sleep or be expected to sleep in this 
business canyon, loud from the thunder of 
the elevated, and bright from the flashing of 
illuminated signs ? " Together they had the 
effect of an electric storm upon him. 

When he did fall asleep he dreamed that 
the Metropolitan Tower, the Woolworth 
Building and St. Patrick's Cathedral were 
dancing Tango upon his chest 

This nightmare may have been due to the 
fact that just before retiring we witnessed an 
exhibition of this modern madness, which 
seemed to be indulged in everywhere except 

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6o Introducing the American Spirit 

If only we might start from that marvellous 
Central Station in the heart of the city ; but 
in order to reach our destination, which was 
Lake Mohonk, we had to cross the West Side 
where it is irredeemably tawdry and ugly, and 
take one of the ferry-boats to Weehawken. 
This somewhat inconvenient procedure made 
the Herr Director doubly critical. 

The Fates were against us, for it was a 
hot, humid day, the car was crowded, and 
the start from Weehawken anything but 
auspicious. 

In Europe the Herr Director travels second 
class when he travels officially (the first, as 
is well known, being reserved for Americans 
and fools), and third when he travels mcog- 
nitOj for he is a thrifty soul. Nevertheless, he 
did not like our cars, they were ** obtrusively 
decorated," and privacy was impossible. 
Why should he have to look at a hundred 
or more human heads variously ^' frisired^^ ? 

I suggested that we take seats in front, 
which we succeeded in doing, and then he 
found that if he wished to take off his collar, 
he would have to do it with two hundred or 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 6i 

more human eyes fastened upon him, when 
the hundred people possessing them had no 
business to see what he was doing. 

I have already confessed how sensitive I 
am to criticism of anything American, no 
matter how just the criticism may be. So 
sensitive am I, that had he reflected upon 
the good looks of my wife, he could scarcely 
have hurt me more than when he reflected 
upon the beauty and arrangement of an 
American railway car. 

And yet I have often wondered why our 
American genius seems to have exhausted 
itself when it evolved the present type of 
car, having done nothing to it except adding 
or taking away some of its *' gingerbread." 
Nevertheless I lost my patience and told him 
that if he liked to travel cooped in with seven 
other passengers, four of whom he must face 
and two of whom might at any moment poke 
their elbows into his ribs ; if he preferred to 
breathe air polluted by seven other people, 
and have a fresh supply of ozone only at 
periods and in quantities regulated by law, 
I did not admire his taste. As far as I was 



62 Introducing the American Spirit 

concerned I preferred to travel in this big 
room on wheels, rather than in a jail-like 
box to which the conductor alone had the 
key. Anyway this represented American de- 
mocracy with its unpartitioned space ; but if 
he really wanted it, I could get him a state- 
room in the Pullman, and he could ride in 
isolated splendor and be aristocratically 
stuffy and uncomfortable. 

When the Frau Directorin in typical Ger- 
man phraseology complained about the 
draft : ** Um Gottes Willen ein Zug / " I 
decided to save the day, and we retreated 
to the Pullman stateroom. 

There they rested themselves back and 
looked tolerably happy while I, silently but 
fervently, prayed that this particular train 
would not disgrace itself by "committing" 
an accident. 

The big, American out-of-doors, even 
where it is old and its waste spaces are 
cultivated and hedged about, has some- 
thing which is characteristically American. 
Of course nature knows no political bound- 
ary ; the grass is green everywhere, the 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 63 

sky is blue, cattle and sheep, like man, have 
a long and honorable ancestry. Yet there 
is a difference which may not be due to what 
nature is, but to man's attitude towards her 
and his treatment of her. 

I have noticed this in passing through 
Europe ; how unerringly one knows where 
Germanic boundaries end and those of the 
Slav begin. German fields and forests are 
trim and orderly ; Slavic territory so ill kept 
and ill used that when one has a glimpse of 
a village even from the swift moving train, 
the difference is obvious. 

Sometimes I am inclined to believe that 
this attitude of man affects his environment 
as much as we know the environment affects 
him. I wonder just how much of the Amer- 
ican out-of-doors, with its generous but not 
gentle aspect, its subdued but untamed spirit, 
is due to those valiant men who came from 
across the sea, and in so doing restored a bit 
of their long-lost courage, and made masters 
of men who so long had been serfs and 
knaves. 

I had hoped that the sudden burst of the 



64 Introducing the American Spirit 

Hudson upon my guests' vision would thrill 
them ; but if they were thrilled, they were 
careful to conceal it. When I suggested the 
likeness of the Hudson to the Rhine, the 
Herr Director took it as a personal affront 
and said you might as well compare St. 
Patrick's Cathedral and that of Cologne. 
They are both churches and Gothic ; the 
Hudson and the Rhine are two rivers, and 
both are big. 

Nevertheless I insisted that there is an 
evident resemblance which would be com- 
plete if the Hudson had a ruined castle here 
and there, or a picturesquely cramped village 
huddling against the hillside. 

"Yes, and beside castles and picturesque 
villages," the Herr Director replied tartly, 
** you need a thousand years of culture and 
the same traditions which make the shores 
of the Rhine sacred to us ; you also need 
generations of patiently plodding peasants 
who have made a sacrament of their toil. 
One glance at your rotting boats lying 
along the shore, at the untilled, gaping 
spaces and glaring, inartistic sign-boards 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 65 

which disfigure it, is sufficient to distinguish 
the two rivers or perhaps even the two 
countries." 

Having thus forcefully delivered himself, 
he scornfully pointed out the waste places 
and the unkempt-looking fields, asking me 
whether I still dared compare anything in 
this out-of-doors with the fine economy and 
splendid supervision of the natural resources 
of his own country. 

Shamefacedly I acknowledged my country's 
guilt, and the guilt which was evident on the 
majestic shores of the Hudson. We are 
wasteful, extravagant and reckless — great 
defects in our national spirit, and most in 
evidence in our treatment of nature's beauty 
and wealth. We shall have to remedy that, 
in fact we are just beginning to do it ; if not 
from any sense of guilt, from the same sheer 
necessity which makes the nations of the Old 
World careful of their national wealth. 

*' The Conservation of our National Re- 
sources " is a fine phrase ; it represents not 
only an economic, but a spiritual gain — this 
feeling of responsibility for the next genera- 



66 Introducing the American Spirit 

tion. It is a new and most valuable asset of 
our national spirit ; yet I must confess that 
I fear the coming of a day when we, too, 
shall have to practice the sordid little econ- 
omies of the Old World and think with anx- 
iety about the to-morrow. 

It has always seemed to me that here the 
miracle of the loaves and fishes might be per- 
formed indefinitely, and that there always 
would be left over the baskets full of frag- 
ments. Somehow, in common with the rest 
of mankind, I have associated generous plenty 
with the American spirit, and I trust we shall 
never have just our dole and no more. 

I recall walking one evening with the Herr 
Director and the Frau Directorin through the 
well-regulated, officially trimmed and ''Streng 
Verboten^^ forest which encircles his native 
city. My children were with us — young, 
vigorous, American savages, who have a 
superabundance of the American spirit al- 
though they have not a drop of American 
blood in their veins. We passed a small 
mound of freshly mown hay and they 
prompdy jumped into it, tossing a few hand- 



The Spirit Out-of -Doors by 

fuls as an offering to their aboriginal deity, 
the wind. If they had dashed into the plate- 
glass window of a jeweler's shop or had 
desecrated the most holy shrine, they could 
not have caused greater consternation. 

*' Um Gottes Himmels Willen die Polizei!^^ 
cried the Herr Director and the Frau Direct- 
orin echoed : " Die Polizei ! " 

Although this happened about ten years 
ago, my children have not forgotten their 
fright. 

I suppose we still lack this virtue of econ- 
omy, and yet I hope we may not lose that 
certain largeness of nature and that gener- 
osity of spirit which have characterized us. 

I love the generous spaces, the unfenced 
lawns, which make of the whole village one 
common park ; the grass and clover free to 
the touch of our children's feet, the fragrant 
flowers wasting their bloom, and berries and 
cherries enough for the wild things of the 
woods. May the future not bring more high 
walls and narrow lanes, big game preserves 
for the rich, and scant patches of soil 
for the poor ; castles for capital and tene- 



68 Introducing the American Spirit 

ments for labor. And may we never see 
written over every blade of grass : " Streng 
Verbotenr 

I realized that the Herr Director spoke truly 
when he said that what we lack over here is 
a healthy class spirit, which the German 
farmer has. A sort of pride in his calling 
which makes him care for the soil and nour- 
ish it with a lover's passion. To him robbing 
the soil is as great a crime as it would be to 
rob his children. It is not only the Emperor 
who regards himself as a partner with God, 
and sometimes the senior partner ; the com- 
monest, poorest peasant is apt to say as he 
drenches his field with the accumulated com- 
post: ^^ Ich und Gottr 

Speaking of the farmer, the Herr Director 
admitted that in Germany as elsewhere there 
is a trend to the city ; but the tide is held 
back by the pride of the German farmer, 
who glories in having his traditions, his folk- 
songs, and, above all, this sense of partner- 
ship with God. 

We scarcely have such a thing as a farmer 
class ; we have merely merchandizers in dirt 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 69 

who sell not only the products of the soil, but 
unhesitatingly the soil itself. 

The land which we see from the car win- 
dow, which the pioneers won from this bound- 
less space, these houses and sheltering groves, 
the homesteads in which a great race was 
cradled, are all for sale, now that the soil is 
robbed of its fertility and the robbers have 
moved on to repeat the process elsewhere. 
We are doing something, he admitted, to 
stem the tide to the cities ; we are introduc- 
ing agricultural training into our public 
schools and are making the raising of corn 
and wheat a science, but not as yet a sacra- 
ment. 

We stayed over night in one of the half- 
asleep towns on the shores of the river, a 
town whose history is written upon the head- 
stones in the cemetery, in the center of which 
the stately meeting-house stands. We met 
the descendants of those who sleep there, 
whose pride lies in the fact that their fore- 
fathers were the pioneers who fought the 
Indians, the fevers and each other. Their 
houses are full of old furniture shipped from 



70 Introducing the Afuerican Spirit 

England and Holland, and we ate their food 
and drank their tea from costly silver and 
exquisite china which they have inherited. 

We looked upon the portraits of their an- 
cestors and were told of their virtues and 
their fame ; we saw fine memorials to the 
past in churches and town halls and rode in 
their automobiles, to see the farms be- 
queathed to them. One thing, alas I they 
have not and never will have — descendants. 

On one of the farms we saw a swarthy 
Italian with a bright red rose behind his ear. 
His wife and children were working with him 
in the field, and they were doing this strange 
thing as they pulled weeds from the onion 
beds — they were singing. The Herr Di- 
rector said significantly, *' These are the 
heirs to all this," and I think he was a true 
prophet. 

It is a wonderful thing to invent agricul- 
tural machinery and to discover new methods 
by which two blades of grass can be made 
to grow where but one grew ; yet if only 
some one could tune our dull American ears, 
so that our farmers might catch the melody 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 71 

of the singing land and sing with it ; if our 
boys and girls would love wild roses well 
enough to wear them — if, and that is a very- 
big if — some one could teach us Americans 
to be proud of having descendants, we might 
add a new note to the great American out-of- 
doors, and keep it American. 

That night we sat upon a wide verandah, 
overlooking a valley through which the 
Hudson rolled majestically ; we saw popu- 
lous cities, picturesque villages and bounte- 
ous farms ; we looked into the heart of the 
out-of-doors and I was proud of it and of 
its free people, who ought to be a grateful 
people. There was deep silence everywhere ; 
no sound except that of the birds, and they 
did not sing jubilantly as birds ought to sing 
in so blessed a place and on so glorious an 
evening. No one sang except the same 
Italian who was coming home with his wife 
and numerous progeny. He still wore the 
rose behind his ear, although it had faded. 
Those who sat with us had every luxury and 
more money than they knew how to spend ; 
but they could not sing, for they were old, 



72 Introducing the American Spirit 

children there were none, and if there had 
been, they would not have been singing — 
they would have had a victrola. 

After the Italian had eaten his frugal but 
pungent fare he came to the big verandah to 
get his orders for the next day, and the Herr 
Director spoke Italian to him and he replied 
in that language which in itself is almost a 
song. His mistress asked him to bring his 
wife and children to sing for us. His wife 
did not come but the children came. They 
would not sing an Italian song, it is true — that 
was just for themselves, in the fields where 
only God heard. They sang some senti- 
mental thing they had heard in the 
** movies " — chewing gum the while. I 
asked them to sing something their teacher 
taught them but they knew nothing except 
" My Country 'tis of Thee " and the " Star 
Spangled Banner," both of which they sang 
joylessly and not understandingly. How 
and why should they understand when the 
Americans did not ? 

It was a day full of dismal failure in my 
attempt to impress upon my guests the 



The Spirit Out-of-Doors 73 

American spirit, and the failure of it was 
* rubbed " in by the Herr Director, who, 
as he bade me good-night, quoted as a part- 
ing shot this bit of German verse : 

Und wo Man singt 

Da las dich froelich nieder, 

Denn boese Menchen haben keine Lieder." 

The rub was in his inference that we have 
no song because we have no noble spirit. 



IV 

The Spirit at hake Mohonk 

MANY years ago the Herr Director 
and I were tramping through the 
Hartz Mountains in northern Ger- 
many. He had not yet achieved portliness 
and fame ; while to me, America was still 
the land of Indians and buffaloes, and I had 
never dreamed of going there. We were 
climbing the Brocken, and that which thrilled 
me more than its granite steeps and deeply 
mysterious pines was, the hundreds of school- 
boys and girls we met, singing as they 
climbed, and who, when they rested, listened 
to their teachers who stimulated their imagi- 
nation and their patriotism by telling them 
the stories which had woven themselves 
around those mountains. 

The Catskills are not unlike the Hartz, 
and I remarked upon it as the Herr Director 
and I were climbing the Walkill Range. 

74 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 75 

Our destination was Lake Mohonk, the scene 
of the Conference for International Arbitra- 
tion, organized and supported by that noble 
Quaker, Albert K. Smiley ; and now after his 
death continued by his able and generous 
brother Daniel Smiley, and his gracious wife. 

The Frau Directorin, with hundreds of 
other guests, had been met at the railroad 
station by carriages, this being one of the 
few places left upon earth where the auto- 
mobile is excluded. 

The Herr Director was not climbing as 
easily as he climbed thirty years ago, and 
neither was I, although I made a brave show 
and led the way, frequently leaving him in 
the rear, much to his disgust. 

"Yes," he said, mopping his brow and 
looking about critically, "this is somewhat 
like the Hartz," and my heart gave a joyous 
leap at his admission ; " but several things 
are missing : Good company, merry songs 
and, above all, places of refreshment." 

Of course I could offer him no better com- 
pany than I was, as there are not many 
people in America who climb when they can 



76 Introdiiciyig the Atiiey'ican Spirit 



ride for nothing; and the only refreshment 
available was clear water from a shaded 
spring. As we drank he recalled laughingly 
how, when we stopped at one of those na- 
ture's fountains in the Hartz, a man who had 
watched us, came running out of his house 
and warned us that we might catch cold in 
our stomachs, at the same time politely 
offering to guide us to a place where we j 
would get something not so dangerously ' 
cold, and with tempting foam at the top. 

I have long ago been weaned from the 
German custom of mixing refreshments and . 
scenery ; but one does miss the boys and 
girls, the merry, happy throngs, their senti- 
mental songs and their fervent, poetic pa- 
triotism. Involuntarily my mind reverted to 
a scene the Herr Director and I witnessed 
after we had finally reached the summit of 
our mountain in the Hartz. It was nearly 
evening, and we could look far and wide 
above the forest into the happy and beautiful 
country. On the very topmost peak stood a 
corpulent German, surrounded by his genial 
group. He was reciting with fervor and 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk jj 

genuine passion, in the broadest Berlinese 
dialect, one of their treasured poems which 
begins with these lines : 

** High upon the hilltops of thy mountains stand I, 
Thou beautiful and mighty Fatherland." 

If this should happen over here, of which 
there is no danger, he would be laughed at, 
if noticed at all ; over there he was treated 
like a high priest who called the faithful to 
prayer. 

As a people we lack not only poetic im- 
agination, we lack also this identification of 
our country with the best in nature. Our 
youth may be to blame for that, or perhaps 
we have so much of nature and so much 
which is beautiful that we have not been able 
to encompass it. Yet there must be some- 
thing very important lacking in such Amer- 
icans as the one whom I met very recently. 
He had just returned from a "Seeing America 
First" tour, and had seen everything from 
Niagara to the Big Tree groves of California. 
When I asked him what he thought of it all 
he said, coolly, '* Oh I it's a big country." 



78 Introducing the American Spirit 

Naturally I did not tell this nor the following 
to the Herr Director. 

A few years ago I went with a group of 
Americans to see one of the famous ice 
caves in the Alps. The accommodating 
guides had lighted candles in the labyrinth 
and the sight was enchanting. One of my 
party, a dry-goods dealer, said with genuine 
enthusiasm : " My I I wish I could get such 
a shade of silk in New York." The other 
said : ** Too bad ; so much perfectly good 
ice going to waste." He belonged to the 
much maligned tribe of ice-men. The rest 
of the men said nothing, although one of 
them did remark when we reached our hotel : 
"This only shows how slow they are over 
here. In the good old United States we 
would light that show with electricity." He 
belongs to the tribe whose name is legion. 

The Herr Director, as my readers have 
found, was very chary of his praise, in fact 
thus far I had not heard a good word from 
him for my United States ; but that evening 
as we looked from the Mountain House down 
upon the dark, deep lake, the rock gardens 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk jc) 

and the quaint bowers on every promontory, 
granite walls broken and scattered, and the 
rich valley between us and the Catskills, he 
did say : ** This is the most beautiful spot I 
have ever seen 1 '* 

Of course his generous mood was par- 
tially gendered by the unequalled hospi- 
tality of our host and hostess and by the 
sight of his fellow guests, who represented 
not only the entire United States, but the 
United States at its best. Moreover, he and 
his wife had received a more than cordial 
welcome because they were representative 
foreigners and spoke English with a "cute 
accent." 

I almost felt a slight touch of jealousy upon 
that point although I am not of a jealous na- 
ture. But I have noticed this : to the degree 
that my English has improved, to that degree 
I have become less interesting to my Ameri- 
can friends, so that I have sometimes been 
tempted to wish that I too might speak Eng- 
lish with a '' cute accent." 

The happy day was almost spoiled for me 
by the discovery that our trunks had not 



8o Introducing the American Spirit 

arrived. The Herr Director worked himself 
into a frenzy and the Frau Directorin had 
dire forebodings of having to spend the three 
days in the same shirt-waist. Telegrams 
were sent in all directions, while the Herr 
Director called our much boasted of baggage 
system hard names ; my " best laid schemes " 
seemed about to " gang agley " when much 
to my relief the trunks arrived, and I felt 
once more assured of the divine favor in my 
most strenuous efforts to '* boost " my United 
States. 

The Herr Director had come to this coun- 
try to take part in the Mohonk Conference, 
and being a prudent man, he submitted his 
address to me. It was written with Teutonic 
thoroughness and as void of places of refresh- 
ment as the Sahara Desert or the Walkill 
Range we had climbed. 

I suggested a thorough revision, the cut- 
ting out of many statistics and resting his 
case, not upon pure business, but upon the 
higher plane of pure justice. He insisted 
upon retaining his statistics and also his ap- 
peal to the selfish and materialistic side of his 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 8 1 

audience ; for he knew *' something about 
Americans " and still doubted their idealism. 

The next morning after breakfast we at- 
tended prayers, which is a part of the daily 
program of this hostelry, and presided over 
by the host, who usually reads the Scriptures, 
announces a hymn and then leads in prayer. 
It is as impressive as it is simple and digni- 
fied, and the Herr Director and his wife did 
their first singing in America when they 
joined in a hymn whose tune is an old Ger- 
man folk-song. 

The program which followed the prayer 
service was dominated by specialists in Inter- 
national Law and they were dry and concise 
enough to suit even the Herr Director ; while 
the dreamers and agitators, whom he ex- 
pected to hear, were almost altogether un- 
represented. In fact they have grown less in 
this assembly each year, largely because it is 
thought that the whole subject has reached 
the point when it is a practical question to be 
discussed by men of affairs. No one knew 
better than the Herr Director how inevitable 
was the next great war and how far we were 



82 Introducing the American Spirit 

from the practical Court of International Ar- 
bitration. 

The epilogue to that great world drama 
had been spoken in the Balkan, and spoken 
with vehemence, passion and fierce cruelty, 
and he knew its bearing upon the whole tense 
situation in Europe. Yet I am sure that even 
he did not know how many nations would be 
involved, nor how costly and deadly would 
be the conflict. He did foreshadow in his 
own condemnation of England and of Eng- 
land's foreign policy the element of hate be- 
tween the two related nations, which was to 
play so important a part in the present war. 

The afternoon is playtime at Lake Mo- 
honk, and most generous are the provisions 
for recreation ; but the Herr Director did not 
ride or drive, nor play golf or tennis. He 
stayed in his room rewriting his paper, hav- 
ing sensed something of the Spirit of Lake 
Mohonk. 

It is a very dignified room in which the 
problem of International Arbitration is dis- 
cussed, and although it never loses its hos- 
pitable, home-like air, one always has the 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 83 

feeling of being before a high tribunal, where 
anything but the most serious mood seems 
out of place ; although a jest sometimes re- 
lieves the discussion. 

An audience of about four hundred people 
gathered that evening, men and women in 
varied walks of life, coming from all the states 
in the Union and from many foreign coun- 
tries. 

There were captains of industry and of in- 
fantry, admirals of fleets and presidents of 
colleges, statesmen and politicians, ministers, 
lawyers and journalists. Their views ranged 
from those who believe that war is an una- 
voidable event in human history, and that a 
little blood letting now and then is necessary 
for the best of men, to those who teach that 
war is a curse and that a certain warrior 
who compared it to the worst place which 
human imagination can conceive, might be 
sued for libelling his Satanic Majesty who 
presides over that place or state. On the 
whole, they represented the men of action 
and men without illusions although with high 
ideals. The Herr Director's paper, minus its 



84 Introducing the American Spirit 

statistics, and keenly critical rather than 
laudatory, was received with applause, and 
he stepped horn the platform in the best hu- 
mor in which I had seen him since he reached 
the United States. 

The real joy of the Lake Mohonk Confer- 
ence, and of all conferences, is the human 
touch, and after the long evening session the 
Herr Director became the center of an inter- 
esting group of men who, while smoking 
their cigars, lost some of their American 
reserve and became sufficiently animated to 
hear and tell stories ; so it was long past 
midnight when the informal session ended. 

Frequently the Herr Director asked ques- 
tions about things which he could not under- 
stand, and it was at such times that I sought 
to enlighten him, or have him enlightened 
by others ; for he had become sceptical as to 
my own ability to inform him regarding any- 
thing American. 

He could not understand, for instance, that 
all this lavish entertainment was free, and 
suggested that it must be a sort of gigantic 
American advertising scheme, carefully con- 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 85 

cealed. When he was tqld that to secure a 
room during the season one must apply long 
in advance, and most likely have fair creden- 
tials before being accepted as a guest, he 
merely shook his head and murmured some- 
thing about these ** inexplicable Americans.'* 

He also did not see how an hotel could 
flourish in any civilized country without per- 
mitting the accepted social diversions, such 
as card playing, dancing, and drinking some- 
thing stronger than the mild beverages served 
at the soda fountain. 

He wanted to know how it was that three 
or four hundred Americans would take three 
days of their time to discuss a theme which 
had little or nothing to do with profits. All 
the Americans he had known about were void 
of ideals, and had no time for anything but 
business or poker. In fact he was astonished 
not to see poker chips littering the side- 
walks. 

I told him that while it is true that the av- 
erage American business man is always in a 
hurry, and gives little time to wholesome re- 
creation, it is also true that in no country with 



86 Introducing the American Spirit 



1 



which I am familiar do men of business give 
their time so generously to the consideration 
of the common welfare as here. They do 
this, not having the incentive constantly held 
out to the European business man, namely : 
Recognition by the state and the reward which 
sovereigns may bestow, in much coveted ti- 
tles and decorations. The average well-in- 
clined American business man is incredibly 
patient, sitting through tedious meetings, 
listening to reports of various philanthropies, 
and earns a martyr's crown attending those 
interminably long banquets with their assault 
upon his digestion and their appeal to his 
sympathies, j 

At Lake Mohonk the Herr Director met 
business men employing thousands of clerks 
to whom they grant vacations and holidays 
without legal compulsion, and for whom they 
have inaugurated welfare plans of far-reach- 
ing importance. It was certainly a revela- 
tion to him that the number of Americans 
who are something more than animated 
money bags is growing larger every day. 

The still more difficult thing to explain to 



The Spirit at hake Molionk 87 

him was the frank and open discussions of 
national policies and the evident international 
view-point of those who took part in them. 
In all the discussions the most striking note 
was : " The United States wants not territory, 
not unfair advantage over other nations nor 
aggrandizement at the expense of lesser peo- 
ples, nor war, certainly not for conquest." 

The Herr Director intimated that in the 
exalted mood induced by being members of 
this conference, we could afford to be gener- 
ous ; but that at a time of national excitement 
we are no better than other people, taking 
what we can get and asking no questions. 

" Uncle Sam was not wholly disinterested 
in Cuba, was he? and as far as Mexico is 
concerned, who fermented the trouble there 
but this same Uncle Sam, that you might 
have an excuse to swallow as much of 
Mexico as you wanted ? " 

Instantly my mind travelled to the time of 
the Spanish-American war, when I was in 
Europe, and the Herr Director was editing 
an influential German newspaper. He wrote 
an editorial, accusing the United States of 



88 Introducing the American Spirit 

beginning the war with Spain for the sole 
purpose of annexing the ** Pearl of the An- 
tilles," and when I disputed his theory we 
nearly severed our ** diplomatic relations." 

I now again vigorously pressed my point, 
to the great amusement of my friends and 
the chagrin of the Herr Director, who could 
not easily refute my statements ; for while 
I acknowledged being an " Unausstelicher 
A7ner leaner y^ I happen to know the Old 
World policies as well as he does. 

I mentioned Austria-Hungary, and its tak- 
ing over of Bosnia and Herzegovina, without 
so much as " by your leave" — and Germany 
which, to salve its hurt, sent a fleet of war- 
ships to China and helped the German eagle 
bury its beak in the Yellow Dragon's tail. I 
mentioned France in Algeria, and England 
everywhere — " and Uncle Sam in the Philip- 
pines," he interrupted. 

I took full advantage of that interruption 
to remind him that Uncle Sam is the only 
power which ever paid for anything gained 
by that right which in Europe seems to be 
the only right ; — the right of might. 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 89 

It was a difficult task which I had under- 
taken, to convince the Herr Director that the 
American Spirit is different from that of the 
Old World, and in spite of me he insisted 
that we are not a bit better than other people, 
but only so situated that we can afford to be 
generous. I assured him that I preferred to 
boast of our fair dealing with lesser peoples 
than of our victorious battles, and that I am 
never so loyally and enthusiastically Ameri- 
can as when I think of our being just, rather 
than mighty. 

I have since been at Lake Mohonk at a 
time when national passions were aroused, 
and when those who had prophesied the 
early passing of the battle fever were dis- 
credited prophets. While there, a letter 
reached me from the Herr Director, in which 
he sent greetings to his host and hostess and 
the members of the conference, and in which 
he recalled his former accusation that we are 
no better than other people; for "are you 
not pro-Ally and filling your pockets with 
the proceeds from the sale of war munitions ? 
Where now is your boasted fairness ? " 



90 Introducing the American Spirit 

My reply was that I in common with 
many others wish we could wash our hands 
of this bloody business of selling ammunition, 
and that I still firmly believe that the Ameri- 
can people will retain their poise during this 
dreadful upheaval. 

Yes, even to-day I can say with no less 
pride than usual that I believe in the Ameri- 
can Spirit, in its sense of fairness and its love 
of justice, and while I trust that this country 
may be kept from so great a catastrophe as 
war, and I be kept from so severe a trial of 
my loyalty as having to choose on which 
side to fight, I know I would freely and 
unhesitatingly be on the side of my country, 
the United States of America. 

Three glorious days had passed at Lake 
Mohonk and when the guests left that moun- 
tain top no one went more reluctantly than 
the Herr Director and his wife, and all the 
way back to the great city they felicitated 
upon their delightful experiences, while I re- 
joiced in my country and its spirit. When 
the Herr Director wrote his book I found 
that he acknowledged having discovered 



The Spirit at Lake Mohonk 91 

four things at Lake Mohonk. First, an un- 
parallelled hospitality. Secondly, that the 
leading men of America are soberly practical, 
unemotional, somewhat self-centered ; but, at 
the same time, men of high ideals. Thirdly, 
that its military men attend conferences for in- 
ternational arbitration, that they do not rattle 
their sabers, and in appearance cannot be 
distinguished from mere civilians. Finally, 
that the American man boasts most and 
loudest of his sense of fairness ; and while I 
write these lines, I am hoping and praying 
that this may indeed be not an empty boast, 
but an integral part of the American Spirit. 



V 

Lobster and Mince Pie 

IF I were gastronomically inclined I would 
study New York's cosmopolitan popula- 
tion and its progress towards American- 
ization from the standpoint of its restaurants ; 
for the appetite is most loyally patriotic. A 
man may cease to speak his mother tongue 
and have forsworn allegiance to Kaiser and 
to King, but still cling to his ancestral bill 
of fare. 

If I were an absolute monarch and wished 
my alien people quickly assimilated, I would 
permit them to speak their native tongue and 
cling to the faith of their fathers ; but I would 
close all foreign restaurants, and as speedily 
as possible obliterate from their memory the 
taste of viands " like mother used to make." 

I fear that it is neither Goethe nor Schiller, 

nor Bismarck nor Kaiser Wilhelm who has 

kept the memory of the Fatherland alive in 

the minds and hearts of many German people 

92 



Lobster and Mince Pie 93 

in America. Dare I say that possibly much 
of their patriotism and loyalty is due to the 
taste of rye bread and sweet butter, Rinds- 
brust and Pell Car toff el^ not to mention a 
certain frothy amber fluid ? 

Be that as it may, when I discovered that 
the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin 
were homesick, I took them to a German 
restaurant to assuage their pangs ; just as if, 
did I detect the same symptoms in an Amer- 
ican whom I wished to make thoroughly at 
home in a foreign country, I would take him 
where a meal could be properly concluded 
with apple pie and cheese or ice-cream. 

The restaurant I selected lent itself particu- 
larly well to my purpose, for everything was 
imported, from the Bavarian architecture to 
the Frankfurter sausages. The Tuenu card 
was adorned by illuminated, medieval letter- 
ing, and on the smoked rafters were painted 
pious and impious verses, which gave the 
room a literary atmosphere. 

It was as crowded and full of tobacco 
smoke and the odors of savory meats as the 
most loyal German could desire, and my 



94 Introducing the American Spirit 

guests were thoroughly at home. They ate 
their food happily, praised it discriminat- 
ingly, and studied the familiar environment 
carefully. As usual, certain things were lack- 
ing ; for the Herr Director is a keen critic and 
never accepts anything as perfect. 

I agreed with him that the orchestra was 
too noisy and on the whole superfluous, and 
that the native American dining there could 
be easily recognized by the indifference with 
which he ate. We heard no loud complain- 
ing, and little or no quarrelling with the 
waiters. The food was accepted in a hum- 
ble sort of way whether it was satisfactory 
or not ; bills were paid, tips were given in 
the spirit of meekness, and accepted in the 
opposite way, and the guests left without 
any ceremony except that of paying their 
toll to the keepers of their hats and coats, a 
form of extortion quite unparallelled abroad. 

In striking contrast to our mere eating 
was my guests' enjoyment of every morsel 
of the food which they had selected, not 
simply because it was food, but because it 
was a note fitting into the gastronomic 



Lobster and Mince Pie 95 

harmony. The head waiter and all his min- 
ions hovered about them with due reverence, 
and woe to him who by pose or gesture 
disturbed the perfect accord. 

A friend from Nebraska who was staying 
at our hotel had joined us at dinner. When 
the waiter handed him the bewildering bill of 
fare, he waved it aside saying : " Just bring 
me a big lobster stewed in milk, with a dish 
of pickles and a mince pie." 

The waiter turned pale, the Herr Director 
gasped, almost strangling on the salad he 
was eating, and the Frau Directorin looked 
at me despairingly. The waiter was the first 
to recover his composure, and cautiously 
suggested that the gentleman might like 
some Lobster ^ la Newburgh. 

" Nix," said the Nebraskan, " I want lob- 
ster a la Milkburgh, and don't forget the 
pickles." 

The waiter retreated and after a long 
conference with his superior, informed the 
gentleman that he could have his lobster 
stewed in milk, but that it would cost him 
one dollar and fifty cents. 



g6 Introducing the American Spirit 

" Hustle it along," was the curt reply, and 
in about fifteen minutes he was deep in his 
bowl of lobster stew, flanked on either side 
by pickles and mince pie, while the rest of 
us were eating our way leisurely and artis- 
tically through a me7tu which began with 
caviar and ended with Camambert and demi- 
tasse. 

After dinner, American men, manners and 
ideals became the subject of a discussion into 
which my Western friend good-naturedly en- 
tered, although he was made a horrible 
example of the fact that we are ill-man- 
nered. The Herr Director insisted that our 
nation is too young to have any except bad 
manners, and while no doubt we had im- 
proved in the years since he first made our 
acquaintance, the improvement had not yet 
permeated the masses. 

That which I called the American Spirit 
was the spirit of the few cultured, academic 
persons I knew, but the majority of the peo- 
ple was as alien to it as was our Nebraska 
friend's lobster and mince pie to our de- 
licious and dietetically correct dinner. 



Lobster and Mince Pie 97 

** I don't give a hang for your * dietetically 
correct dinner.' I want what I want, when I 
want it I " the Nebraskan said, smiting the 
table with his fist, and evidently suppressing 
stronger language with an apologetic glance 
at the ladies of our party. 

" That is exactly it ; you want what you 
want, when you want it," the Herr Director 
repeated, ** whether or not it is on the bill of 
fare, or in the statute book, or among the 
laws of the Universe. In that I suppose you 
Americans all agree ; that is your American 
Spirits He uttered the last phrase with 
special emphasis, and with no attempt to 
hide the sneer. 

I admitted that my friend's demand for the 
thing he wanted, regardless of the bill of fare 
and in defiance of a dietary law (of which he 
was not as yet conscious), was a manifes- 
tation of our individualism, a rather wide- 
spread characteristic. I was fain also to 
admit that our individualism is not always 
as harmless to others as in the case under 
discussion. It is an attitude of mind which 
has developed into a system to which we 



98 Introducing the American Spirit 

are committed for better or worse, and is in 
striking contrast to the German ideal of 
submission to an accepted order. 
(^ '*Yes," from the Herr Director with evi- 
dent pride. **That which makes Germany 
great and strong is our willing submission 
to authority ; but remember it must be in- 
telligent authority, and at the same time it 
must be efficient. To be sure," he acknowl- 
edged, "we are often chagrined by the 
* Streng Verboten ^ to the right of us and the 
^ Nicht ErlaubV to the left of us. We are 
much governed but we are well governed, 
and you, too, will some day discover that 
the common weal has to be above the indi- 
vidual's caprice. Your evident disrespect of 
laws and conventions results from the lack 
of intelligence back of them, and you have 
no respect for your lawmakers because they 
do not deserve ito" J) 

At this point the Nebraskan astonished us 
by saying that he had recently been in Eu- 
rope on business, selling grindstones, that 
he knew something about Germany, and he 
never was gladder to get back to God's 



Lobster and Mince Pie 99 

country than when he finally set foot upon 
his native soil. He had many adventures, 
and as an example of what he had to suffer 
from one of Germany's well enforced laws, 
he told a story which proved his sense of 
humor, though the " laugh was on him." 

** When I was in Berlin I made out a small 
bill for some goods I had sold, and the man 
told me that I must affix to it some revenue 
stamps. I didn't want to bother with it, and 
told him so. The thing was too trifling 
anyway. 

"I never thought of that bill again till I 
was forcibly reminded of it in Hamburg as 
I was about to sail for home. I was haled 
before the court, and the judge fined me 
fifty marks. Of course I knew I had to pay 
it, so I handed him the money and told him 
in good English to take it and go to the hot 
place with it. I didn't dream that he under- 
stood, but he replied in as good English as I 
gave him : * Officials of my rank travel first- 
class. I must therefore have fifty marks 
more.* That little joke cost me a lot of 
money. I wouldn't want to live in a country 



loo Introducing the American Spirit 

where I couldn't tell anybody I pleased what 
I felt like telling him." 

The Herr Director doubted the accuracy of 
the story because " no German official would 
show so little dignity." I, too, doubted it ; 
but on the ground that no German official 
would have so keen a sense of humor. 

There followed an animated argument be- 
tween the Nebraskan and the Herr Director 
as to which is of more importance, the indi- 
vidual or the state. The Nebraskan insisted 
that the state being the creation of individ- 
uals, they are of supreme importance, while 
the Herr Director persisted in his theory 
that the state is supreme and that it is the 
business of the individual to make it domi- 
nant and powerful, to which end the state 
must make him effective. 

** An ineffective individual is a menace to the 
state, and a state which cannot impress its will 
upon the individual and make him submissive 
and effective will be vanquished in the great 
competitive struggle constantly going on." 

" I suppose you're effective enough, but 
you're as slow as molasses in Januaryc" 



Lobster and Mince Pie i o i 

" Oh, yes, we are slow, but we are thorough ; 
we take our time to do a thing well, while 
your hurry is as wearing as it is useless. 
When we came down here this evening we 
were in a hurry. We were rushed to your 
crowded subway to take a certain train, al- 
though the next one would have done as 
well. In about three minutes we were pushed 
out of that train into another, because it went 
faster, and we reached here breathless. We 
saved time, but for what purpose? To see 
you eat your lobster and mince pie ? " And 
he looked contemptuously at the Nebraskan. 

" What are we going to do now with the 
two or three minutes we saved ? " 

This was a question I could not answer, 
for I did not know why I had hurried. Per- 
haps because of the excess of ozone in the 
air, or possibly because every one else was 
hurrying. 

"You see," he continued, "we Germans 
never make the mistake of confounding 
hurry with efficiency. We hurry, too, when 
we must, or when we have a rational pur- 
pose. We know that great things cannot 



I02 Introducing the American Spirit 

be accomplished in a hurry. We lay our 
foundations not only patiently, but thor- 
oughly and cheerfully. 

"You work like slaves who are eager to 
finish the job, as you call it. We cherish 
towards our job a sentiment of love and 
loyalty which we call * Pjiichttreue^ a word 
for which you have no equivalent, proving 
of course that you have not the thing itself." 

I translated the word as loyalty to duty. 

" Yes, that may be correct, but it does not 
ring true. Pflichttreue has an ethical sig- 
nificance which your translation does not 
convey. 

" I have noticed that your conductors shed 
their uniforms the instant they leave their 
trains, as if they were ashamed of their job. 
With us, any uniform, whether a railroad con- 
ductor's or a general's, is gloried in, and hon- 
ored because of the work it represents." 

The Nebraskan thought us too democratic 
for uniforms, which is the reason we do not 
value them more than we do. 

" It is not the uniform, it is our work in 
which we glory. A shoemaker with us is as 



Lobster and Mince Pie 103 

proud of his job as the Emperor is of his. 
He is Emperor by the grace of God, because 
he believes it is a God-given task to which 
he must be faithful, and we once had a shoe- 
maker who called himself with equal pride, 
* Shoemaker by the grace of God.' 

** This pride spiritualizes the simplest and 
commonest work by making every man a 
conscious part of the state, and he works for 
its glory and power. It is a glory shared by 
his wife and family," and the Herr Director 
pulled from his pocket a German newspaper. 
" Look at this funeral notice. The widow 
signs herself not only as the widow of a par- 
ticular man, but as the widow of a man who 
did something of which she is still proud. 
While she remains a widow she will sign 
herself Amalia Henrietta Schmidt Koenig- 
liche Hof Opern Obo Spieler^ s WittweT 

" How can we be proud of our jobs,'' 
queried the Nebraskan, after his hearty 
laugh at Amalia Henrietta Schmidt^ ** when 
we never have a job which we expect to 
hold permanently ? I started out with school 
teaching, then I got hold of a good thing in 



I04 Introducing the American Spirit 

the way of Carborundum and made grind- 
stones. That's what took me to Europe. 
When that business went bad, I bought out 
the livery stable in my town, and now I am in 
the moving picture business. If I could sell 
out at a good price Fd do it and take up any 
old thing as long as there is money in it." 

He was right. Our work is not sacred to 
us, for too often it is only the means to an 
end, and frequently a very selfish end. Be- 
cause Germany has had centuries of carpen- 
ters and tinkers and shoemakers who planed 
boards and mended pots and shoes ** by the 
grace of God," and swung the hammer as if 
it were a sword, they are now wielding the 
sword as if it were a hammer. 

In some way we must get this spiritual ap- 
peal of the job, which means not only that we 
shall have to dedicate ourselves to our task 
in a manner worthy of its significance, but 
that the state must have this spiritual atti- 
tude towards the worker, and treat him as 
though worthy of his place in the economy 
of the nation. It is this wise provision for the 
workers' efficient education, the state's recog» 



Lobster and Mince Pie 105 

nition that the well-being of the individual is 
its concern, which has given to Germany the 
unfailing devotion of all her people. 

I was roused from these meditations by- 
hearing the Nebraskan's voice. 

" You see I never had a chance to learn 
just one thing. I can do many things tolera- 
bly well, for I had to do them. I can splice 
a rope, repair a machine, shingle a house and 
if necessary build a barn. I can play ragtime 
on the piano, throw a steer or ride a bucking 
broncho. I can even make soda biscuits. I 
am the child of the pioneers, and in order to 
survive, they had to be jacks of all trades. 

" I bought a tool in a department store the 
other day," and he drew it from his pocket. 
** It can do sixteen things tolerably well, but 
it isn't worth shucks for any one job, if you 
want to do it right. That's me." 

The Herr Director wanted to know what 
** shucks " meant, and after I laboriously ex- 
plained it to him and he had handled the 
patent tool he said : 

" Your travelling men have come over to 
Germany and tried to sell us this kind of 



io6 Introducing the American Spirit 

thing, but they found no market. When we 
want a gimlet, or a saw, or a coat-hanger we 
want that one thing and want it as good as 
it can be made. We marvel at your adapta- 
bility, but we are too thorough to be adapta- 
ble, and we do not need to be. You Ameri- 
cans will never be able to compete with us 
until you learn to specialize and do one thing 
well.'' 

We sat long into the night comparing the 
German and the American Spirit, but there 
was one phase of the former which the Herr 
Director clearly demonstrated. There was a 
religious fervor in his patriotism which the 
average American lacks. To him his coun- 
try was not only above himself but beyond 
everything else on Earth or in Heaven. 
There often seems something sordid about 
our patriotism, something connected solely 
with the individual's well-being. I glory in 
our sense of liberty, in the opportunity to 
live unmolested, and in every man's chance 
to be himself ; but I fear we have as yet not 
learned to value our duty to this country as 
much as we do our privilege. 



Lobster and Mince Fie 107 

I am sure there will be no lack of fighters 
if the country is in danger ; but shall we be 
able to fight the long, exhausting battle 
which presupposes discipline and subordina- 
tion? 

The United States gives much to the indi- 
vidual, more, I think, than any other country ; 
but she has not given intelligently, she has 
nearly pauperized us all by her beneficence, 
and has demanded nothing in return, nor 
even taught us common gratitude. 

Our children are told that they must love 
their country, but what that means beyond 
fighting when it is in danger they know not. 
That it means to do their work thoroughly, 
that they must learn to do things well, and 
exalt the nation by becoming efficient work- 
men that they may help win their country's 
battles in the factory, or behind the counter, 
they do not yet know ; and what we have 
not learned, we cannot teach. 

This questioning mood of mine is never 
gendered as I contemplate the mob, the 
many who are driven to revolt either by 
their unbridled passions or by the unbearable 



io8 Introducing the American Spirit 

conditions under which they have to labor ; 
my fear is strongest when I look into the 
schools and when I face our youth which 
comes out of them, inefficient, but above all, 
undisciplined. They do not lack physical 
courage, nor yet devotion to the country, in 
a sort of abstract way ; they do lack the sub- 
mission to intelligent authority. 

In this latter-day test of different ideals of 
the state, through the cruel, undecisive test of 
war, we may learn from Germany to instill this 
** PflichttreueJ^ this loyalty to the job. We 
may also learn the more difficult lesson for 
us individualists — submission to authority 
which we must make intelligent, as well as 
conscientious. 

Necessity will soon teach us to be thorough, 
and thoroughness presupposes patience. Add 
these qualities and this discipline to the enter- 
prise, the love of fair play, the courage, the 
faith in God and man, which we possess, and 
we too may ultimately develop a patriotism 
which will stand the test of adversity, and 
emerge from it purified and strengthened. 

When we stepped out of the restaurant 



Lobster and Mince Pie 1 09 

and its German atmosphere into the unmis- 
takably American Broadway, my German 
guests felt that my rampant Americanism 
had been thoroughly subdued. However 
they had literally ''reckoned without their 
host." My protracted silence had misled 
them, but I could contain myself no longer. 

" We are now walking in the streets of the 
second largest city in the world, its popula- 
tion thrown together and blown together 
from every quarter of the globe, and the 
most of these people, if not the worst of them, 
have come here in the last thirty-five years. 
They brought neither love of their new coun- 
try nor knowledge of its language and insti- 
tutions ; they all came to make money, and 
to-morrow morning four millions of people 
will begin again the competitive battle from 
which they are resting to-night. 

** The laws which govern them are illy 
made, but they have made them, or at least 
had a chance to select those who did make 
them. They have not always chosen well ; 
the officers who govern them are often not 
good men ; frequently they are only the most 



1 1 o Introducing the Ajnerican Spirit 

cunning politicians and one has but scant re- 
spect for them. Yet in spite of it all, this is 
a fairly well governed city and it is quite re- 
markable that these four million people live 
together in comparative peace and order. 
Neither is there any ill from which this great 
city or any group of its individuals suffers 
for which there is not some help or healing 
or some attempt to heal. 

'*If I were an absolute stranger without 
money, knowing neither the language of the 
people nor their ways, I would rather be on 
the streets of the city of New York than any- 
where else." 

" How do you account for it ? '^ the Frau 
Directorin ventured to ask, although the 
Herr Director had been violently expressing 
his dissent. 

" We have several things to count on here, 
even when conditions seem intolerable. Let 
me name them. 

*' We are all human beings ; some of us 
have inherited the Old Testament righteous- 
ness and the passion for justice, and many 
of us have the New Testament desire for 



Lobster and Mince Pie 1 1 1 

service. These together make a very effect- 
ive combination, and go a great way towards 
the glorious results we shall ultimately 
achieve." 

For once the Herr Director was silent, and 
as we had reached our hotel, I think I might 
have slept peacefully that night had not the 
Nebraskan triumphantly remarked as we 
were being shot up to the topmost floor : 
" Say, I did get that lobster a la Milkburgh 
with pickles and mince pie, didn't 1 ? I 
always get what I want when I want it." 



VI 

The Herr Director and the ^^ Missoury*^ 

Spirit 

THE anteroom of the editor's office 
was crowded when the Herr Di- 
rector and I arrived to meet the men 
of the stafi^ at luncheon. 

The Herr Director is a publicist himself, 
and has edited one of the best known Ger- 
man newspapers. Having called on him 
when he was trying to mould an already 
moulded public opinion I made some interest- 
ing comparisons which he did not approve. 
I could not forbear reminding him how, 
when I once called on him in his office, I 
had to wait in a similar anteroom over an 
hour, that I had to pass through a number 
of other rooms with a longer or shorter 
period of waiting in each, and was finally 
admitted to his august presence as if he were 
a king on his throne. 

As editor in chief, he was a more or less 

112 



The " Missoury'' Spirit 113 

cloistered mystery, and not the man of affairs 
one is likely to be over here. Whatever 
comparisons I made in spite of the Herr 
Director's protest, were not entirely fair ; for 
editors are scarcely a, species anywhere, and 
the particular one upon whom we were call- 
ing was an uncommon editor of an un- 
common journal. Neither he nor it has a 
counterpart in Germany if anywhere in the 
world ; they are both products of our Spirit 
and have had no small share in shaping it 
and giving it expression. 

While 1 was explaining to the Herr Di- 
rector the functions of this journal and how 
intelligently it interprets current events, and 
was extolling the virtues of its editors who, 
in spite of being persons of national reputa- 
tion and great importance, have retained 
their simple, democratic ways, they emerged 
from the inner sanctum. 

After a vigorous hand-shake all around to 
which the Herr Director visibly braced himself, 
the first contact was made, and we were taken 
to a handsomely appointed dining-room in the 
same building, where luncheon was served. 



114 Introducing the American Spirit 

Beneath all the outer simplicity and demo- 
cratic demeanor of our host, beneath his 
smoothly shaven, well groomed, correctly 
tailored exterior, the Herr Director recog- 
nized a dignified reserve and consciousness 
of power, which made him whisper to me, 
" His Majesty and suite," at the same time 
soothing with his left hand his aching right 
hand, just released from the vise-like grip of 
the editor. 

Although I assured him that to me they 
were all just the editors of my favorite journal 
and after that plain, American citizens, I too 
am often impressed by that sense of domi- 
nance and power emanating from these men 
and others in similar positions. The feeling 
is not unrelated to that I have experienced 
the few times I have been in the presence of 
royalty. 

In our public men of exalted position there 
may be lacking the mystical element by 
which monarchs are surrounded ; but the 
sovereign American has more physical 
energy and force. 

Should the thrones of Europe suddenly 



The ** Missoury '' Spirit 1 1 5 

become vacant, I know dozens of our men 
who could occupy them, without their sub- 
jects becoming conscious of much change ; 
and as far as queens are concerned we could 
easily furnish a surplus. 

The Herr Director and I had been chosen 
to sit in the places of honor, and we (or at 
least I) forgot to eat, and spent my time 
studying these superb types of Americans. 

The Herr Director, being more sophisti- 
cated, absorbed both the food and the com- 
pany, and in his lectures on ''Die Leitenden 
Maenner in Den Vereinigten Staaten^^ which 
he has delivered since returning to Germany, 
there are evidences that he remembered the 
minutest details of the meiiu^ as well as every 
word which fell from the lips of the editor in 
chief. 

Of course we spoke of many, if not all, the 
perplexing problems w^hich vex this problem- 
ridden age, and each of us had a proprietary 
interest in one or more of them which we 
hoped to solve. The editor as a man of 
affairs knew our particular problems as well 
as we knew them, and had read all that any 



1 1 6 Introducing the American Spirit 

of us had written ; so the conversation was 
animated enough, and certainly illuminating. 

My specialty being immigration, and hav- 
ing just returned from the Pacific coast where 
I had studied the problem as it concerns the 
Oriental, the conversation was finally domi- 
nated by that interesting and somewhat 
delicate theme. 

Can we assimilate all these varied elements 
which come to us ? Can we make of them 
one people, and eliminate all those ethnic, 
national and religious inheritances which are 
frequently at variance with our own ? 

The editor believed we can assimilate all 
or most of them with the exception of the 
Oriental, " Who, having separated from the 
ethnic root in the Pleistocene period, repre- 
sents too varied a physical and mental type 
to be assimilated by the Occidental." I think 
I am quoting him correctly, although not 
word for word. 

As I did not quite agree with him, I ex- 
pressed my views, and so did the Herr Di- 
rector. I said I thought I noticed among 
the Chinese and even among the Japanese 



The '^ Missoury'' Spirit 117 

the influence of this new environment, and 
could tell of conversations with groups of 
graduates of our colleges, in which not only 
the influence of this country was noticeable, 
but the influence of the particular institution 
from which they graduated. Anecdotes are 
not easily accepted as scientific proof; but 
this being an informal luncheon, I ventured 
a few of them which every one seemed to 
relish except the Herr Director, and he is not 
to blame for that, as anecdotes are rarely 
international. I do blame him, however, for 
telling me that he had never heard stupider 
jokes in his life. One of these ethnic anec- 
dotes I told upon the authority of the Bishop 
of the Yangtsze district. Perhaps like all 
anecdotes it may have grown in the telling. 

The Bishop had picked out an unusually 
bright Chinese lad to have educated in the 
United States and then become his curate. 
When he returned to China, after having 
attended both a college and a theological 
seminary, he was assisting the Bishop. Evi- 
dently he had not thoroughly mastered the 
ritual of the church ; for this Oriental, who 



1 1 8 Introducing the American Spirit 

had "separated himself from the ethnic 
root," moved close to the Bishop, poked his 
elbow into the ecclesiastical ribs of his 
superior and asked : ** Say, Bishop, where 
do I butt in ? " 

Our host wanted to know whether I was 
sure that he did not say : " Bish " ; I thought 
to reach the point of being able to express 
himself so briefly and directly the Oriental 
would need at least another geologic period. 

One of the staff asked whether that 
anecdote was not my invention ; to which I 
took the liberty of replying that if I could 
invent such good stories he might offer me 
an editorship. How imperfectly, after all, the 
Oriental may absorb the spirit of our lan- 
guage, I told in the story which is supposed 
to have its origin at the University of Michi- 
gan ; although like all such stories it may 
be claimed by innumerable birthplaces. 

A Hindoo student, who had not quite fin- 
ished his academic career and had to return 
home on account of illness in his family, wrote 
back to his faculty adviser, notifying him of 
the death of his mother-in-law, in this char- 



The " Missoury " Spirit 119 

acteristic, brief, Occidental way : ** Alas I the 
hand which rocked the cradle has kicked the 
bucket." 

The Herr Director thought this anecdote 
funny enough, but it proved the opposite 
from that for which I was contending. " Who 
but an Oriental could invent such highly pic- 
turesque figures of speech ? " 

The conversation drifted into soberer chan- 
nels when our host took up the question as 
to what constitutes the American, who after 
all is hybrid and frequently so mixed that 
he does now know just how he is ethnically 
constituted. 

" For instance,*' he said, " I am part Ger- 
man, part revolutionary Yankee stock " (it 
seemed to me that he put the emphasis upon 
the revolutionary), '* part French, part Scan- 
dinavian, part Irish." 

I have forgotten just how many racial 
strains he said were running in his veins, but 
a variety large enough to be exceedingly 
useful to him in claiming kinship with all 
sorts of folk, and in making political speeches. 
That the ancestors of the average American 



I20 Introducing the American Spirit 

belong to the great fighting stocks of hu- 
manity may explain if not excuse his love 
for physical combat. Each guest around the 
table followed the editor's example and ac- 
counted for his ancestry, showing that all but 
two of the Americans were mixtures, ranging 
from three to eight more or less greatly difTer- 
entiated races, using that term in its broadest 
sense. 

One of these unmixed Americans gave the 
outlines of his family tree, all of it growing 
out of the rugged New England soil ; but 
every one of his daughters had married a 
man of foreign birth, or of foreign parentage. 
His sons-in-law are German, Polish, French 
and Jewish. He added : " My German and 
French sons-in-law are great chums." 

The other pure American was myself, al- 
though of course my ancestors did not come 
over in the Mayflower, and I have never been 
in New England long enough for my family 
tree to take root in its historic soil. 

After all, though, the best thing a nation or 
race has to bequeath to its children is not al- 
ways handed down upon the racial channel. 



The ** Missoury " Spirit 121 

I think it is the Apostle Paul who discovered 
this long ago, and his missionary propaganda 
among the Gentiles is based upon his belief 
that they are not all Israelites who are of the 
circumcision. His converts became Israelites 
through adoption, through their appreciation 
of the Jewish Spirit which came to its full 
fruitage in Jesus of Nazareth. 

I once heard Max Nordeau say: *^ Es gibt 
zweierlei Juden : auch Juden U7id Bauch 
Juden ;^'' which freely translated means: 
*' There are two kinds of Jews : those of the 
spirit and those of the stomach." The taste 
for Kosher Wurst and Gefillte Brust is inher- 
itable to the tenth generation ; but one is not 
always born with the passion for righteous- 
ness, the love of justice and the thirst for 
God. To these one must rather be born 
again, and the same thing is true of the 
American. There are Americans who have 
thrown overboard their spiritual inheritance, 
who have expatriated themselves because 
they could not live in the Puritan atmos- 
phere of New England ; but to whom a Sun- 
day in the Riviera is not fully radiant, unless 



122 hitroducing the American Spirit 

upon the rose-laden atmosphere there comes 
wafted the fragrance of codfish balls. 

The Herr Director reminded the com- 
pany of the fact that I was the most ''Un- 
atistehlichcr Americaner^^ he had ever met; 
to which the editor responded that he knew 
one who was if anything worse than myself 
— a newspaper man, Jacob Riis. 

" Can a nation feel secure, having to put 
the keeping of its Spirit into the hands of 
aHens?" some one asked; and what would 
happen in case of a conflict between the 
United States of America and the native 
country of even such thorough Americans as 
Jacob Riis and myself ? At that time the an- 
swer was not as difficult as it is now, since 
there has been the possibility of such a con- 
flict, and slumbering love of native country 
has been awakened by the roar of cannon 
and the noisier and deadlier war carried on 
by the press. 

It has been a very trying time for those of 
us who have been called ** hyphenated Amer- 
icans " ; but I doubt that the German or 
Austrian hyphen has been more in evidence 



l^he ^^ Missoury'' Spirit 123 

than that which we are pleased to call Anglo- 
Saxon. 

I can say that in spite of the fact that my 
native country precipitated the conflict, I felt 
no thrill of patriotism when Austrian troops 
invaded Serbia, and frequently wonder 
whether I have not suffered some moral 
deterioration, because through all these stir- 
ring times I have remained fairly rational. 
I have never condoned Austria's treatment 
of the Slavs, nor Germany's invasion of Bel- 
gium ; I have not gloried in their victories, but 
I have suffered alike for all my fellow mor- 
tals who are involved in this most disastrous 
conflict. I know myself always human first, 
and a loyal American next. In fact, never 
before have I loved my adopted country as 
much as now, never did I have for it so pro- 
found a respect, nor a deeper realization of 
the blessing of our democracy, imperfect as 

It IS. 

The Herr Director insisted that we could 
not count on the loyalty of our immigrated 
citizens in case of war with their respective 
countries, especially as they are so frequently 



1 24 Introducing the American Spirit 

dealt with unjustly by our courts and ex- 
ploited by our industries. The editor thought 
that the danger to the United States did not 
lie in the lack of loyalty in our new citizens, 
but rather in the general smugness of the 
average American, and in our unprepared- 
ness for war. 

The conversation drifted into a discussion 
of militarism, a subject which has become 
painfully familiar since, and he said that 
although the American is a fighter he is not 
a militarist, nor in danger of becoming one ; 
and that personally, he, in common with all 
sane Americans, believed that the country 
ought to be prepared to protect itself and 
defend its national honor. 

" That's what we all say," the Herr Di- 
rector remarked. When the whole company 
laughed, he felt hurt, and it took me a long 
time to explain to him that he had accident- 
ally stumbled onto a bit of American slang, 
which he had used most innocently, but 
aptly. 

I wanted to know just what the editor 
meant by preparedness for war and just 



The ^^ Missoury'' Spirit 125 

when a nation's honor was so damaged 
that nothing but war would restore it. 
There seemed to be no time left to have 
this question answered, and as there was 
some danger that we would separate with 
this important subject upon our minds and 
perhaps interfering with our digestion, I 
asked whether in conclusion I might tell 
another ethnological anecdote, which would 
illustrate my need of light upon that ques- 
tion of preparedness for war. To this they 
all assented if I could vouch for its being as 
good as the others. I thought it was better 
because I was sure it was true, and the joke 
was on me. Every one settled down ex- 
pectantly except the Herr Director who 
never relishes my stories, having a fine 
collection of his own which he tells remark- 
ably well. 

I had to wait at a small station in the West 
for one of those periodically late trains, and 
was reading the only fiction available, the 
railroad time-table. A train which came 
from the opposite direction brought a gang 
of working men who had been shovelling the 



I 26 Introducing the A??ierican Spirit 

snow which had blocked the road. As they 
were all immigrants I had no further use for 
my time-table and went among them, guess- 
ing at their nationality, sorting them accord- 
ing to the shape of their heads, delighting my 
soul by talking to them as much as I could 
of their native country, and quizzing them 
about their experience in the United States. 

I had succeeded splendidly with all of 
them and there was but one man left. As 
soon as I saw him I said to myself, " He is a 
Russian, not a common Russian, but of the 
Velko Russ variety which is still rare or com- 
paratively rare among our immigrant pop- 
ulation." I walked up to him and saluted 
him with the pious greeting of his class. 
There wasn't the slightest indication that he 
understood me, so I concluded that I was 
mistaken ; but knowing that he was a Slav, 
I tried a greeting in Polish, and again the 
great, shaggy Slav seemed not to under- 
stand. When Bohemian failed, I decided 
that my error was merely geographical 
and this was a Southern, not a Northern 
Slav. I used all the Serbic I knew without 



The ^^ Missoury'' Spirit 127 

getting anything but a stare from my victim, 
and then decided that he might be an Alba- 
nian. Knowing only two words of that 
language I tried them with the same nega- 
tive result. Finally, disgusted with myself 
I resorted to English. Feeling sure that he 
would not understand, I shouted at him, 
** Are you a Greek?" Then a ray of intelli- 
gence passed over his stolid face. Deliber- 
ately taking his pipe out of his mouth, he 
laconically replied : " No, I am from Mis- 
soury." 

A shout of laughter followed my story ; 
but the Herr Director's face grew darker 
and darker. When we were in our taxicab 
going back to the hotel, he said : " One of 
the most remarkable things I have learned 
to-day about the American people is that 
they are very young, almost childlike." 

*• Why, how did you learn that ? " I asked. 

"Oh," he answered, "who but a child- 
like, naive people would laugh over such a 
stupid joke as yours ? Anyway, how did 
you dare bring such a silly story into so 
serious a conversation ? " 



128 Introducing the American Spirit 

*' Yes," I replied ; " that is as you say a 
sign of our youth. The more complex and 
seasoned jokes belong to the older civiliza- 
tions, and the love of a simple story and the 
ready response to it, even though it be a 
poor story, are a sign of our youthful health ; 
but you know," I added, " that story I told 
was not so mat apropos after all." And the 
rest of the day I struggled mightily to con- 
vince the Herr Director that being "from 
Missoury" is one of the most hopeful things 
about the American Spirit. 



VII 



The Herr Director and the College 
Spirit 

*' r I "^AKE us out of New York," the 
Herr Director said after a wear- 



I 



ing day of sightseeing, " or we 
will go home on the next steamer. My neck 
aches from looking at the sky-scrapers, my 
nerves are all on edge, and," glancing at the 
Frau Directorin who had hugely enjoyed 
every moment and showed no sign of weari- 
ness, *' we must have rest." 

I was reluctant to leave New York, be- 
cause, after all, it holds those great thrills 
with which we like to startle our foreign 
friends. I feared the change from those 
daily surprises which thus far I had been 
able to give them. Lake Mohonk, the only 
place outside of New York City which we 
had visited, is unique in many ways and its 

experiences were not likely to be duplicated ; 

129 



130 Introducing the American Spirit 

so it was somewhat heavy heartedly that 1 
started them on a new adventure, praying to 
Him who ** holds the nations in the hollow 
of His Hand " to aid me in my praiseworthy 
endeavors. 

I was not very sanguine that my prayer 
would be answered, for we were beginning a 
tour of the Eastern educational institutions, 
than which there is nothing more difificult 
to interpret. This, not only because they 
have no counterpart anywhere in Europe, 
and the line between our university and 
college is so indistinct, but because I hoped 
to reveal their Spirit, which no mere outsider 
can comprehend, and which even the man 
on the inside finds it difficult to understand. 

I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, 
alumni of the different institutions, who knew 
every blade of grass on each respective 
campus, over which they walked proudly 
and reverently. To find one university 
tucked away in a village, another defying 
the grime and noise of a growing city which 
crowded upon it ; one still retaining its air of 
exclusive dignity in spite of its garish sur- 



The College Spirit 131 

roundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped 
by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, 
yet remained triumphantly American, was 
new enough and startling enough to keep 
my guests on the heights. 

The pleasant walks, shaded by tall, grace- 
ful elms, and the presence of distinguished 
Americans, acted soothingly upon the Herr 
Director ; while the gracious attention paid 
to the ladies convinced the Frau Directorin 
that she had reached the feminine paradise. 
She could not understand, however, why, 
when the ladies were permitted to go every- 
where, and were even allowed to gaze at 
American students in athletic undress, they 
were barred from sharing with us the rare 
privilege of seeing a thousand or more of 
them being fed in one of those Gothic dining 
halls. There, surely, one might expect noth- 
ing worse than medieval piety tempering the 
appetite. Probably this tradition of no ladies 
in the galleries is the only thing beside the 
architecture which is left us from that hoary 
age. 

There are certain definite points which the 



132 Introducing the American Spirit 

enthusiastic alinnmis always tries to impress 
upon visitors, and one of them is the past, 
in which every college glories, and as youth 
seems to be unpardonable, history begins 
when as yet it " was not." 

In most of the places we visited, no such 
historic license was necessary, for many of 
them were respectably old, one of them be- 
ing contemporaneous with the history of our 
country, and others belonging to that emi- 
nently respectable period, ** before the Revo- 
lution." 

Some have important battles named after 
them, and several were '* Washington's head- 
quarters," a distinction freely bestowed upon 
many places by that ubiquitous and much 
beloved " Father of our Country." At pres- 
ent the most important thing seems to be 
the buildings ; dormitories, laboratories, li- 
braries and usually most prominent of all, 
the gymnasium and the athletic field. 

The president of one of the lesser univer- 
sities, having such a million dollar plaything, 
became our cicero7iey and while he took us 
hastily through everything else, lingered 



The College Spirit 133 

fondly there, showing us in detail the ex- 
pensive apparatus. With classic pride he 
stood upon the athletic field, looking as 
some Caesar must have looked when he 
showed visitors to Rome his arena, the 
" largest," and at that time the '* costliest in 
the world." 

It was interesting to find that the buildings 
which pleased the Herr Director most were 
neither new nor Gothic, a fact easily ex- 
plained by his dislike for everything which 
is English. He marvelled that we had chosen 
to imitate English college architecture, with 
its heaviness and gloom, its hideous gar- 
goyles, its useless, and here meaningless, 
cloisters, rather than to continue our fine 
inheritance, with its severely classic lines, its 
wide windows inviting the light, and its 
generous, broad doors, so much in harmony 
with our educational ideals. 

Of course no one had an answer ready ; 
yet personally while I do not '' hasse'^ Eng- 
land nor the things which are English, I 
vastly prefer, let us say Nassau Hall at 
Princeton, to anything which that glorious 



134 Introducing the American Spirit 

campus holds, not even excepting the gradu- 
ate college with its massive and impressive 
Cleveland Memorial Tower. 

The Herr Director shook his head many a 
time at the external glory of our universities 
and even more at the comfort and luxuries 
of the dormitories and fraternity houses. We 
were the guests of one fraternity at dinner. 
About twenty young men were living under 
one roof, having chosen each other by some 
mysterious, selective process, and I was 
tempted to think that it was their negative 
rather than their positive qualities which 
drew them together. We were shown the 
house from cellar to garret, much to the dis- 
may of the Herr Director who does not like 
climbing stairs, but to the joy of the Frau 
Directorin who, woman-like, not only loves to 
peep into closets, and see pretty rooms, but 
having discovered the American standard 
for feminine grace, wanted to lose some of 
her *' meat " as she expressed it in her quaint 
English. 

Each of these young men occupied a suite 
of three rooms. The hangings were heavy 



The College Spirit 135 

and not in the best taste, the chairs all in- 
vited to leisure, and the most conspicuous 
piece of furniture was a smoking set with a 
big brass tobacco bowl in the center ; while 
innumerable pipes hung from a gaudily- 
painted rack. In keeping with the furniture 
were the pictures which were decently vulgar, 
and of books there were no more than neces- 
sary. 

The Herr Director was asked regarding 
student life in Germany, and he contrasted 
their surroundings with his own cold, inhos- 
pitable Gymnasium^ the relentless examina- 
tions, and the freer but responsible life in his 
university. He described the rooms of the 
present Emperor of Germany when he was 
a student at the University of Bonn, remark- 
ing that they looked like barracks in com- 
parison with these. "How can you study 
in such luxurious rooms?" he asked, and 
naively and frankly came the answer : ** We 
don't." 

On the whole, the Herr Director liked the 
looks of the boys he saw, and the Frau Di- 
rectorin quite fell in love with them. They 



136 Introducing the American Spirit 

were so frank, so clean looking, and what 
above all amazed them most, so altruistic 
in their outlook upon life; they looked so 
healthy and well groomed and were so alto- 
gether wholesome. But that boys could 
graduate from colleges and not have studied 
— that was beyond their comprehension. 

The German student's social standing and 
his future depend upon his " exams." There 
is only one prime thing, and that is study. 
When the Herr Director learned the multi- 
plicity of our outside activities which divide 
the attention of the students, he knew why 
they do not study. He was aghast at the 
scant reverence paid members of the faculty. 
When walking with the president of one 
of these universities, we met groups of stu- 
dents who did not salute the head of their 
institution and barely made way for him to 
pass, he grew quite wrathy, and it took the 
combined efTorts of the president and my- 
self to keep him from telling the young 
men what boors they were. I think he 
discovered later that it was mere thought- 
lessness, and that there is something really 



The College Spirit 137 

fine about the average American student ; 
that he is usually a gentleman at heart, but 
that he has not yet learned to value the 
grace which comes from that sacrament of 
the common life — lifting his hat to his su- 
periors. 

When I told him that one of my students 
came to me one morning in haste, with ** Say, 
Prof, where is Prexy?" he did not laugh 
as I expected ; but when I remembered that 
I did not laugh either, when it happened, I 
forgave him his lack of perception. 

It is of course true, that the average college 
professor would rather be called Jimmy or 
Jack or some other pet name than to have 
his academic degrees pronounced every time 
a student speaks to him ; but there still re- 
mains the fact that the ordinary American 
youth lacks this sense of respect for person- 
ality, and that an education, even a college 
education, does not remedy the defect. 

It is a very exciting moment in the life of 
the undergraduates of at least one university 
when they try to discover if the preacher can 
make himself heard above their coughs, which 



138 Introducing the American Spirit 

is their way of challenging his message ; but 
it does not help him to believe that he is in 
the presence of men who know what rever- 
ence means. 

I do not deny that the undergraduate 
honors achievement, but even in that he 
lacks proper discrimination. How much edu- 
cation can do to instill this common and de- 
plorable lack of reverence for personality 
I do not know ; for it lies far back, too far 
back to be reached by mere academic train- 
ing. 

During our tour, the Herr Director had a 
chance to see one university come out of its 
incoherence and inexplicable confusion into 
unity. He heard it roar like the ** Bulls of 
Bashan," fling its flaring colors to the wind, 
hoot its defiance to the enemy, dance, der- 
vish-like, around the battle flames ; he saw ten 
thousands of young men suffering the war 
fever, and an equal number of young women 
shrieking in wild delirium ; he saw embank- 
ments of automobiles struggling to reach the 
seat of the conflict, armies of men trying to 
storm the ramparts, and newspaper corre- 



The College Spirit 139 

spondents mad from haste ; while in the 
center of it all, twenty-two disguised men 
struggled for a chalk-line. Unfortunately, no 
friendly guide was near us to explain it all, 
and as I am still an un-Americanized alien 
to a football game, its meaning was lost to 
my guests. 

When two men were carried from the field 
limp, and seemingly lifeless, the Frau Direct- 
orin promptly fainted. The Herr Director 
was beside himself, for there was no way to 
extricate ourselves from the maddened mass 
of humanity ; but while he was wildly and 
vainly calling for water, she revived, and we 
stayed to the finish. I wished I had not 
brought them, for to appreciate a football 
game one must be born in America, and no 
explanation I offered could convince the Herr 
Director that we are not more cruel than the 
Spaniards, whose opponents in their deadly 
games are bulls, not men. The Frau Direct- 
orin still sheds tears at the remembrance of 
how badly we use our ** perfectly nice young 
men." 

The fierceness back of this conflict, the vast 



140 hitroductJig the American Spirit 

amount of money spent upon properly play- 
ing the game, the primary place it occupies 
in the imagination of the American youth, its 
deadening influence upon scholarship, and all 
the multitudinous pros and cons, are over- 
shadowed by the fact that, as far as the com- 
munity at large is concerned, it expects this 
Roman holiday, and a college or univer- 
sity is considered good or poor, to the degree 
that it caters to this desire. One thing I can 
say for it : it is thoroughly American, bring- 
ing into the lime-light some of our virtues 
and most of our faults. 

** In Germany," again the Herr Director, 
" where things are not permitted to grow 
merely because they grow elsewhere, it was 
found that for military preparedness your 
sports are of little or no value, especially if 
engaged in vicariously; and that teaching 
men to dig trenches and serve cannon, to 
obey implicitly a command and carry it out 
efTectively, is of more use, not only to the in- 
dividual's well-being, but also for the great, 
collective purpose of national defense." 

It seems very strange to me that nearly all 



The College Spirit 141 

foreigners whom I have helped introduce to 
our academic life have been so gratified by 
its evident democracy, and that their satisfac- 
tion was greatest when their own aristocratic 
lineage was highest. That a man's career in 
our institutions of learning is not made im- 
possible because he does manual labor to 
help him through, and that he may do such 
femininely menial tasks as waiting on table 
or washing dishes, while taxing their credul- 
ity, is always unstintingly praised. 

I have, however, good reason to believe 
that while our foreign visitors find the 
democracy of our colleges interesting and 
praiseworthy, we are losing the thing itself to 
a large degree, and my conscience has not 
always been at ease when I finished a pane- 
gyric on college democracy. In fact what 1 
fear is its defeat just there, where it is most 
needed, where we are supposed to train the 
leaders who, whether they become leaders or 
not, are the men who will give tone to our 
national life and will control its expression. 

In travelling from one of the universities to 
the other, we came upon a group of college 



142 Introducing the American Spirit 

men in the train. The Herr Director recog- 
nized them at once, whether instinctively or 
because he had discovered the type, I do not 
know. I knew them because of the fit of 
their garments, or the lack of it, and by the 
fact that they smoked cigarettes incessantly. 

The Herr Director, as a distinguished 
foreigner, had no difficulty in opening a con- 
versation with them, and I think he got 
much illuminating amusement out of them. 
They had just finished their semester ** exams," 
and one of them said that the question upon 
which he flunked was a comparison between 
the two English authors, Dickens and 
DeQuincy. Though he did not know the 
difference between these two, he showed his 
classic training by differentiating between a 
Rameses 1 1 and an Egyptian Deity cigarette 
merely by the color of the smoke. 

I was not drawn into the conversation until 
the Herr Director needed me to interpret some 
campus English. One of the lads undertook 
to inform us regarding the social life of his 
university and more especially the fraterni- 
ties, with particular emphasis upon his own. 



The College Spirit 143 

which excluded not only certain well-defined 
races, but also put a ban upon certain classes. 
" We don't admit anybody into our fraternity 
whose people are not somebody in their com- 
munities." 

I asked him his name and he gave it to me 
with a French pronunciation. 

I thought he was Bohemian, and recognized 
the name as such, in spite of its French dis- 
guise. I told him so, and pronounced it for 
him in the hard, Slavic way, all gutturals and 
consonants. I also told him its meaning : 
" A very common hoe such as the peasants 
use, and it means that your ancestors in 
Bohemia earned their living honestly, which 
I am sorry to say cannot always be said about 
* people who are somebody ' in our communi- 
ties." 

The Herr Director thought I was very hard 
upon the poor fellow, and later I had a good 
talk with him. I tried to show him that his 
Bohemian, peasant origin ought to be a 
source of pride to him. That the very fact 
that he and his people had come out of the 
steerage, and by virtue of our democratic in- 



144 Introducing the American Spirit 

stitutions could rise to the point where they 
could send him to college, should make him 
a guardian of the American Spirit and not its 
foe. I do not know that he profited by what 
I said ; for I often find myself talking to the 
wind and the tide, and they are both against 
me. 

I have only pity for the gilded youth who 
go to an American college with its vast 
opportunities of human contact, yet fail to see 
any one outside their own social boundaries. 
After all, the chief glory of our educational 
institutions is that their best things are still 
democratic. No man is kept from the Holy 
of Holies, from sound learning, from the con- 
tact with scholarly minds, from good books, 
and enough of rich fellowship to make going 
to college worth while. 

We heard one delightful story which is so 
typically American and so reveals the Ameri- 
can Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director 
embodied it in his book. The president of a 
Quaker college told us that just as he found 
there was some danger that the men who had 
to work their way through, were losing cast. 



The College Spirit 145 

one of the upper classmen opened a boot and 
shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he 
was a man of means, whose standing in his 
group was unquestioned, his action took 
from common labor its ever renewing curse. 

In many of the colleges we met groups of 
men so full of this spirit, so concerned with 
fostering it, that all the snobberies of which 
we had heard seemed even smaller than they 
were in their own right. We met those who 
gave their leisure hours to that most difficult 
and worthy task of Americanizing the immi- 
grants who, in many instances, almost en- 
croached upon the campus. The students 
visited them in the box-cars where they lived, 
or in the hovels where they reared children ; 
they taught them English and the elements 
of good citizenship, and every one of them 
had some particular Antonio to whom he was 
devoted, and whom he was trying to lift to his 
level. 

Although the general testimony was that 
the students had gained more from the con- 
tact than the immigrants had, I know how 
immeasurably much it means to these stran- 



1 



146 Introducing the American Spirit 

gers to have leaning up against their own 
lonely souls men of culture, and sweet, clean 
breath, and brotherly heart. 

It is this idealism in our college youth 
which is so precious an asset that to lose it 
would mean bankruptcy to our educational 
institutions. 

Although the Herr Director did not tell 
me, I knew that this excursion into the uni- 
versities of the East had been a success ; for 
thus far he seemed to have enjoyed every- 
thing ; at least he did not complain about 
anything. He seemed in an especially happy 
mood when we were talking it over in the 
home of one of the presidents, whose guests 
we had become. ** Yes, I like your colleges 
very much, and if I should want my boy to 
have four years of more or less organized 
happiness, I would send him to an American 
college. He would have a good time, I 
think his morals would be safe," and he 
added with a smile, " his intellect would be 
safe also." 



VIII 

The Russian Soul and the American 
Spirit 

N~^EW YORK is geographically mis- 
placed for such a purpose as mine. 
It ought to lie somewhere west of 
Niagara Falls, so that one might be able to 
take strangers to that wonderful cataract 
without their having previously exhausted 
all the emotions which they are capable of 
expressing. 

The day journey between New York and 
Buffalo is never commonplace, especially 
when it furnishes such euphonious names as 
Susquehanna, Wilkes Barre, Mauch Chunk, 
etc. From the hilltops we had glimpses of 
great valleys below, valleys which are mined 
and furrowed and channelled by a great in- 
dustrial host whose crowded dwellings re- 
semble the hives of bees and are as mon- 
otonously alike. 

I could make these glimpses interesting 

147 



148 Introducing the Amer'iccln Spirit 

enough, for I could tell by the shape of the 
church steeples and by the style of cross 
which crowned them, what faiths were there 
contending with each other. With equal 
certainty, and by the same signs, I knew the 
nationality of the people who worked there, 
and had faith enough to build steeples in the 
shadow of mine shafts and coal breakers. It 
was an atmosphere tense from the labor of 
seven unbroken days, and heavy from 
noxious gases in which trees languish and 
die, fish perish in the murky rivers, birds 
fear to nest, and man alone, immigrant man, 
lives and works and worships. 

The Herr Director, like all Germans, has a 
natural contempt for the Slavs, and when I 
proposed that before we visited Niagara 
Falls we should see some of the Slavic set- 
tlements, he demurred ; but when the Frau 
Directorin added her plea to mine, he re- 
luctantly yielded. I was able to promise 
them an interesting meeting with an idealistic, 
young Russian priest, who had voluntarily 
taken a mission among these miners. He 
was earnestly striving to guard their souls. 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 149 

and also that which seems quite as precious 
to their church, their Russian nationality. 

The Greek Orthodox Church is the most 
nationalistic church in existence, and where- 
ever those bulbous towers with their slanting 
crosspieces dominate the sky, it is equivalent 
to the raising of the national flag. The 
Slavic soul is thoroughly Christian in its 
quality of patient endurance, in which it has 
had long and hard tutelage. At the same 
time it is tenacious and unyielding of its par- 
ticular dogma, having been taught from its 
earliest consciousness that its salvation lies 
in strict adherence to the national faith. 

The city where we tarried is one of the 
best in which to study the Slavic Soul, and 
its relation to the American Spirit, being 
large enough to express that Spirit in its 
varied manifestations ; yet not so large that 
the articles it manufactures hide or crush the 
articles of its faith. 

I knew my guests would like the place, 
for while it is a busy town in the very 
heart of Pennsylvania's industrial region, it 
has retained a sort of homelike atmosphere. 



150 Introducing the American Spirit 

Situated midway between the large cities 
and the small towns which we had thus far 
visited, it has all the usual bustle, and is full 
of vigorous rivalry with other like cities in 
the same valley. Whatever one city does, 
whether building ambitious sky-scrapers or a 
commodious Y. M. C. A., promoting a re- 
vival, or bringing in new industries, this little 
city endeavors to duplicate upon a still larger 
scale. 

My guide for the day was the town's chief 
** husder," the secretary of the Y. M. C. A., 
who is an embodiment of the American 
Spirit, being both body and spirit. He 
made a splendid foil to the Russian priest 
who is all soul, Russian soul and as little at 
home in the United States as the Czar's 
double eagle would be, floating from the 
city's court-house which stood in typical 
court-house fashion in the center of the town 
square. 

The Y. M. C. A. secretary met us at the 
station, needless to say, in an automobile, as 
there is nothing the average American would 
rather do than "show off" his town. He 



Russian Soul and American Spi7'it 151 

gave his time unstintingly for that purpose, 
beginning the process by taking us through 
his institution which is American enough to 
have challenged the Herr Director's atten- 
tion. In great good humor he, with the 
rest of us, followed the secretary from the 
bowling alley to the roof garden, looked into 
the dormitories and class rooms, and pro- 
tested only when our zealous guide gave us 
long statistics as to how many people took 
baths, how many men were converted, and 
how much of the mortgage had been paid off 
during his incumbency. 

I had to explain to the Herr Director the 
meaning of mortgage and its relation to our 
religious institutions ; for the two seemed re- 
lated in some mysterious way. 

He was duly impressed ; for this practical 
side of religion, this combination of saving 
souls and giving baths was new to him. 
Newer and more interesting still was the 
clerical machinery with its card indices, its 
numerous secretaries, stenographers, and its 
clock-like regularity and efficiency. 

The secretary is undoubtedly a religious 



152 Iiiti'oducmg the A^iierican Spirit 

man ; but he is a business man first, and 
his soul has had no small struggle in an 
atmosphere which demands that he attract 
new members, raise a generous budget, pay 
off a mortgage and at odd moments look 
after his own business ; for besides being 
secretary of this great institution, he dabbles 
in Western lands, has an interest in a canning 
factory, and helps "boom" the town. 

I could assure the Herr Director that, 
nevertheless, his soul survives ; for the 
average American is remarkably adaptable, 
and while this secretary may permit his relig- 
ion to suffer before his business, I know he 
does not ** lose his own soul " ; although in 
that respect as in everything else he does run 
frightful risks. 

When we left the palatial lobby of the 
Y. M. C. A., having had bestowed upon us 
its annual report, souvenir postal cards, and 
incidentally a prospectus of the Western Land 
Co., the secretary insisted upon accompany- 
ing us. As he put his automobile at our dis- 
posal, and the Slavic settlements were out of 
reach by the ordinary means of locomotion, 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 1 5 3 

we reluctantly accepted his kind offer, the 
Herr Director having previously confided to 
me that he did not like the secretary's 
" hustle," and that his " efficiency " made 
him nervous. 

There were two things which the Frau 
Directorin found everywhere and in which 
her soul delighted : marked and courteous 
attention to the ladies — and automobiles. 
We took just one street car ride in New 
York City, having been fairly showered 
by offers of automobile rides, one form of 
hospitality of which we have grown quite 
prodigal. 

It was well that we had both the secretary 
and the automobile ; for although I thought I 
knew where the Russian parish was located 
I did not reckon with the fact that it was 
three years since I had last visited it. Dur- 
ing that interval the town had so altered that 
the landscape was quite unrecognizable. 

It is the peculiarity of this and neighbor- 
ing towns that it changes its topography over 
night. What was a hill becomes a hollow, 
and the reverse process also takes place 



154 Introducing the American Spirit 

though more slowly, because of the huge 
culm piles which accumulate. 

The mining of coal being carried on under 
the town has been so thorough in later years 
that intervening coal props have been re- 
moved, and houses and churches which 
formerly were above the level are now below 
it 

We finally found the Russian church and 
its adjoining parsonage in as uninviting an 
environment as I have ever seen. The three 
years since I visited them had not only let 
them down from their eminence, but had de- 
veloped a stagnant pool on one side, while 
refuse from the mines had encroached upon 
the other. All the glory of red and yellow 
paint had departed, leaving only a drab 
dinginess, the prevailing tone of the land- 
scape. 

The priest received us in his study, which, 
besides the Icojis and a Samovar had no orna- 
ments. The musty air was full of cigarette 
smoke, and most diminutive stumps of these 
^* Papirosy^^ were lying about, adding to the 
general untidiness. A parish register lay 



Russian Soul a?td American Spirit 155 

upon the desk. It contained the names of 
more than a thousand souls with the 
chronicle of their coming into this world and 
their going out of it, and also that most im- 
portant item, when they had attended Holy- 
Communion, the one visible sign of their 
allegiance to the true faith. 

The Holy Father had a strange history. 
The son of a priest, he naturally was destined 
for the same calling. Caught by the ever 
moving tide of revolt he had " sown his wild 
oats," which consisted of disseminating revo- 
lutionary literature. He was imprisoned, 
then like many good Russians repented, and, 
as a penance, came to Pennsylvania. 

In desolation and distance from home his 
parish was not unlike Siberia. It was even 
worse, for it was an exile from like-minded 
men, and his suffering on that score was 
acute. I have watched the manifestation of 
national or racial characteristics in individ- 
uals, and I feel certain that the Russian re- 
flects those characteristics most intensely, 
whether he be peasant, priest or noble. 

Not without reason does he call his coun- 



156 Introducing the Ainerican Spirit 

try ** Mother Russia." He has for her just 
that kind of affection, and it is as different 
from the violent love of the Herr Director for 
his Fatherland as is the matter-of-fact senti- 
ment of the American for his. 

The Russian completely reflects his coun- 
try, and as both her virtues and her faults 
are feminine, there is in him something 
gentle and yielding towards external author- 
ity, and yet something unconquerable and 
defiant. There is a capacity for suffering 
and sacrifice of which no other people seem 
to be capable. There is also a confidence in 
the goodness of humanity, no matter how 
bad it may seem, which reminds me of the 
confidence of the woman who is beaten by 
her drunken husband, yet knows that in his 
sober moments he is not a bad man. 

The predominance of the spiritual quality 
may or may not be feminine, but it certainly 
is Russian, and one may indeed speak of the 
soul of a people in relation to the Slavs in 
general, and the Russians in particular. 

The priest possessed all these character- 
istics ; he was the Russian Soul, and this 



1 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 157 

soul quality became even more apparent in 
contrast with the complex spirit of the Amer- 
ican secretary, in whom Teuton and Celt 
were blended, and with the Herr Director, 
whose soul had hardened under the discipline 
which Germany had given him. 

He lost no time in beginning an argument 
with the priest as to the relations of their re- 
spective countries, and when it threatened to 
become acrimonious, the secretary, hoping 
to create a diversion, asked the priest why 
he did not encourage his parishioners to 
come to the Y. M. C. A. At that point I 
threw myself into the breach, and with con- 
siderable difficulty directed the conversation 
into safer channels. 

I asked the priest to show us his mission, 
and he took us into the church, much poorer 
than any I have ever seen in Russia, and 
then into the schoolroom, where the children 
of the miners received their religious instruc- 
tion and as much of secular education as they 
craved. The teacher was a lean youth who 
looked as if he had suffered moral, spiritual and 
physical bankruptcy before coming to Amer- 



158 Introducing the American Spirit 

ica. He and the whole equipment seemed 
hopelessly inadequate and out of place. 

The secretary did not know that hundreds 
of children were growing up in an American 
community, yet completely isolated from it, 
and the Herr Director remarked that in 
Germany this would be regarded as treason 
to the state. The priest declared that it was 
his mission in America not only to keep his 
people and their children loyal to the national 
church, but to inject into our Westernized 
materialism this true Slavic faith and its 
leaven. 

He believed that in America we lack soul. 
We worship science and money and busi- 
ness. The Russian alone lives in intimacy 
with God and regards that relation of the 
supremest importance. "The American," 
he continued, " believes in developing natural 
resources, the German develops the mind, the 
Russian alone develops the soul." 

I have always had the greatest reverence 
for the Russian Soul. I have learned some- 
thing the Herr Director could not see, on ac- 
count of the natural, political antagonism 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 159 

between his own country and Russia ; some- 
thing the secretary could not comprehend 
on account of his provincialism, and the 
priest would not admit because of his ofBcial 
position, namely : that neither the Russian 
State nor the Russian Church represents 
the Russian Soul. Its common people, al- 
though nearly crushed by the one and con- 
fused by the other, are still Christian souls 
and as such have a mission to America ; but 
I could not see how that mission would be 
fulfilled by locking up a few hundred chil- 
dren in a filthy schoolroom and teaching 
them their national catechism. 

The Spiritual Russia, as it is incorporated 
in its common people and as it is interpreted 
by Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky, has reached us 
and taught us the greatest lesson which we 
self-righteous Americans needed to learn : the 
impossibility to judge our peers or to be 
judged by them. 

It was Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky who com- 
pelled some of us to see our own guilt, and 
they, not the Russian Church, united our 
voices with those of the Russian people in the 



i6o Introducing the American Spirit 

chief note of their Mass, " Lord have mercy \ 

Lord have mercy ! " The Russian peasant 
always knew that men are stricken by crime 
as by a disease ; and when he passed those 
consigned to prison, he cried out incessantly : 
" Lord have mercy ! O Lord have mercy ! " 
And for the man who escaped, he never 
hunted with the bloodhound's passion, as we 
do ; he put a crust of bread upon the window, 
to help him on his way. 

It was news to the secretary that Judge 
Lindsay, the " Kid's Judge," as he is affec- 
tionately called, received his inspiration from 
Tolstoy, and that the tendency to change our 
prisons into Social Clinics was originally sug- 
gested by Dostoyewsky, a name quite un- 
familiar to him. 

The Herr Director spoke of the inadequacy 
of these same Russians when they try to put 
their theories into practice, and what prosaic, 
impossible preachers they make. To which 

1 replied that their failures are due to their 
preponderance of soul and their lack of the 
practical spirit with which we are so super- 
abundantly endowed. 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 1 6 1 

The secretary could scarcely believe that 
his practical, matter-of-fact, card-indexed, 
efficient-from-top-to-bottom, result-bringing, 
tabulated, report-making, American Y. M. 
C. A. might be benefited by an infusion of 
Russian Soul. He almost doubted that the 
delving miners whom we saw coming home 
from the mines, sooty and begrimed, pos- 
sessed that soul. Nor did the Herr Director 
realize that all his Germanic searching and 
classifying, all his minute, painstaking in- 
vestigation into the innermost of everything, 
left him where the Russian had long ago 
preceded him : in the holy presence of the 
unknowable, unsearchable wisdom of God. 

The American has great reverence for 
results, and it is hard for him to be patient 
with failure. The German respects authority, 
and has scant respect for the individual. 
The Russian respects man and knows what 
it means to love him in his weakness, and to 
be humble in the presence of another's failure. 

I had a long, intimate talk with my friend 
the priest, who has never spent a happy day 
since he has been in America which he hates, 



1 62 Introducing the American Spirit 

or rather, despises, and so hurts me more 
than he knows. 

Throwing open the well-thumbed, poorly- 
kept register, in such striking contrast to the 
Y. M. C. A. secretary's card index, he said : 
** Look how many I have buried this 
month," and he counted them, and there 
were eighteen, " all of them slain in that 
dreadful mine, and no one in the Company 
or in the town cares how they were buried. 
These Americans have no souls. They send 
an undertaker who wants to bury them like 
dogs, and the quicker the thing is done the 
better. They sent me notice shortly after I 
came here that the funerals lasted too long 
and kept the men from work. Look how 
those men walk ! My viujiks, who walked 
like princes, now bend their backs before 
your dirty coal, and walk like slaves." 

His complaint was not altogether unrea- 
sonable. In some things he was right, in 
many things he was wrong ; but to argue 
with a Russian is as hopeless as to try to 
argue with Niagara Falls. I did tell him 
that while the Russian here must bend his 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 163 

back over his work, he does not have to bend 
it at every corner before the icon or before 
every policeman he meets ; that here, by vir- 
tue of the American Spirit, his soul may be 
freed from superstition and his mind from 
darkness. 

When in parting the priest embraced and 
kissed me, he said ; " No, even you don't 
understand the Russian Soul." 

The Herr Director suffered his embrace 
with good grace, but when the secretary's 
turn came he fled. To be kissed by a man 
is a sentimentality which the American can- 
not endure. 

" We don't understand the Russian Soul," 
I said to him, "neither you nor I, but one 
thing I do know. When the coal has been 
dug out of these hills and these cities shall 
have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, 
and your churches and Y. M. C. A. may 
have vanished because it did not pay to 
keep them going, this Russian Soul will en- 
dure ; and the sooner we learn to understand 
it the better for us and for them and for our 
country." 



164 Introducing the American Spirit 

When we left the Russian church and its 
faithful priest, the Frau Directorin told us 
that the children were incredibly filthy, and 
that she had spent the time we wasted in ar- 
gument cleaning them up, good hausfratc 
that she is. The secretary was thinking 
deeply, and when he deposited us at the 
hotel, he thanked me for revealing some- 
thing which, although so near, he would 
never have discovered. The Herr Director 
kept me up until midnight talking about the 
Slavic menace to Germany, and the intel- 
lectual poison of its modern literature. 

We reached Niagara Falls the next after- 
noon, and, as I had feared, neither of my 
guests showed any surprise nor felt any 
thrill. I could understand the Herr Direct- 
or's coolness towards our natural wonder, 
for he had seen it thirty years before ; but 
his wife's attitude was inexplicable, until she 
told me what I had all along anticipated. 
Her capacity for receiving impressions had 
been exhausted by the city of New York, and 
after seeing the ** high-scraps " nothing as- 
tonished her. 



Russian Soul and American Spirit 165 

As we stood at the bottom of the American 
Falls, watching the Maid of the Mist making 
her journeys into their very spray and re- 
turning, only to begin her journey again, I 
suggested that it was like the American 
Spirit in its daring ; but the Herr Director, 
with truer insight, said that it was ** like the 
Russian Soul, mystical, elusive, on the verge 
of destruction always, but of little practical 
service." 

That same day we were in a power-house, 
which looked more like a temple than the 
utilitarian thing it is, and peered into the 
depths of a shaft which creates power enough 
to move the street railways of half a dozen 
cities, and change the night of a million 
people into day. As we listened to the 
engineer's account of almost miraculous 
achievement, I said triumphantly, " This is 
the American Spirit ! " and the Herr Di- 
rector replied deliberately, and without sar- 
casm, ** This is the one time when you are 
right." 



IX 

Chicago 

WHAT the foreigner thinks of the 
American Pullman, if he has to 
spend a night in it, may be found 
in any volume of the extremely voluminous 
and interesting literature upon the United 
States, written by visitors to this country ; 
but more interesting still would be what 
they have not written about it, and that I 
have had frequent chances of hearing. The 
most picturesque and exhaustive comments I 
ever heard were those made by the Herr 
Director the evening we left Buffalo, and as 
he finally determined not to retire at all, we 
spent the greater part of the night in the 
smoking-room, much to the dismay of the 
porter who had no prejudice against sleeping 
on a Pullman, and whom we cheated out of 
his irregular but necessary naps. 

One of the chief diversions of travellers the 

i66 



Chicago 167 

world over is to complain against the par- 
ticular transportation company over whose 
road they have the ill luck to be going ; so 
it happened that the Herr Director had 
plenty of company during part of his vigil, 
and an opportunity to come in touch with 
one phase of the American Spirit, where it 
was closely related to his own ; for ** one 
* kicker ' makes the whole world * kick.' " 

The small room was so crowded that some 
of the men were sitting on the wash-stands, 
and the rest were so close to each other as to 
make conversation easy and general. This 
was an extra fare train supposed to be un- 
usually comfortable and speedy ; although 
thus far it had been losing time. It was 
natural under those conditions that the rail- 
road should come in for its share of blessings, 
couched in language such as is often heard 
in smoking compartments of Pullman cars. 
Had all the pious wishes expressed that 
night been fulfilled, that railroad and our 
particular train would have travelled much 
more swiftly, but to a destination not indicated 
in the time-tables. 



1 68 Introducing the American Spirit 

The question under discussion was, which 
is the worst railroad in the United States, 
and as some of the men were stock-brokers 
they knew our roads from their most vulner- 
able side. The tales they told of the ma- 
nipulation of stocks and the fleecing of the 
public, with their consequent effect upon the 
service, were as startling as they were hu- 
miliating ; because, in the last analysis, the 
railroads reflect the general business ethics of 
the country. 

I kept out of the discussion, for not only 
have I but a hazy notion of economics ; my 
mind was busy classifying the passengers' 
racial origin, a very diverting exercise and 
one which always brings me in touch with 
people on their really human side. 

It happened that two of the men were 
Polish Jews from Cleveland, who had risen 
from poverty to where they could travel in 
Pullman cars, and who confessed that they 
knew as little of railroad stocks as I, although 
they were engaged in as risky a business as 
stocks, that of manufacturing women's cloaks. 
They were not far removed from the Ghetto 



Chicago 169 

either in speech or ideals, and so were of 
litde interest to me. 

A third fellow traveller, who bore the hall- 
marks of the average American, both in dress 
and behavior, told me his business without 
much urging. "I am not selling stock, nor 
manufacturing women's cloaks, and I am not 
a gambler. I have a sure thing ; I am a 
bookie." Forced to confess myself ignorant 
as to what ** a bookie " is, he explained to 
me the intricacies of his calling, the problems 
of evading the law, and if it cannot be 
evaded, how it may be bought ; incidentally 
showing what an inveterate gambler and 
what an easy mark the average American is. 

The Herr Director was all attention, to my 
great consternation ; for the conversation was 
as different from that which he had heard at 
Lake Mohonk, or in our rounds of the Eastern 
colleges, as one could conceive. As one by 
one the passengers sought their berths, the 
Herr Director thanked me for arranging this 
uncomfortable night journey, saying that 
though he was sure he could not sleep, he 
was *' so glad to have come in contact with 



170 Introducing the American Spirit 

the American Spirit as it is,'^ and not as I 
had tried to make it appear. With that kindly 
thrust he too retired, and I was at liberty to 
do likewise. 

It was not long before I had auricular evi- 
dence that the Herr Director was asleep, so I 
was very much astonished to hear him say 
the next morning that he had not slept a 
wink, and that the engineer must bear him a 
grudge ; for he tried to jerk the berth from 
under him, and *' Gott sei dank'' that the 
most uncomfortable night of his life was 
over. I certainly was as grateful as he. It 
was with no small satisfaction, though, that 
upon reaching Chicago two hours late, I col- 
lected four dollars from that much abused 
railroad, and handed the same to the Herr 
Director, assuring him that even in a railroad 
office the American Spirit of fairness is opera- 
tive. 

In Chicago as everywhere else the friend 
who owned an automobile was at my com- 
mand, and on a glorious May day when wind 
and sun had cleared the air, and a night's 
rain had washed the streets, we were taken 



Chicago 171 

from South Shore to North Shore and away 
out where the American city is at her best, 
and Chicago is striving to excel them all in 
her wonderful suburbs. 

The Herr Director had seen Chicago over 
thirty-three years ago — a young, thriving, 
daring, ambitious city in the making ; he 
found her still young, thriving, daring, and 
in the making. Unchastened by her great 
disasters, undismayed by her vexing prob- 
lems, defying the lake, she reaches out into it 
and into neighboring states, leading and con- 
trolling the whole Middle West. Babylon, 
Capernaum, Rome, her older sisters, her 
ideal, and perchance her destiny. She is 
par excellence the merchant city, and the 
merchant princes rule her, although that rule 
is not unchallenged. 

While the Herr Director saw the city 
changed in many respects, larger, and in 
places beautiful, her dirt not so apparent, 
her wickedness subdued, and her rough 
corners rubbed off, she is still Chicago, a 
synonym for boastful bigness and ostenta- 
tious wealth. 



172 Introducing the American Spirit 

If it had not been for the Frau Directorin, 
I would not have taken them where every 
man, woman and child is taken who visits 
Chicago, into the largest department store in 
the world. 

She entered with the joyful anticipation of 
engaging in that most exciting occupation — 
shopping — aided and abetted by my wife. 
The Herr Director followed with the martyr's 
air common to husbands who go along to 
pay the bill. 

That type of store is no longer a novelty 
to city dwellers anywhere, but this one be- 
cause of its size, the variety and quality of 
goods displayed, the courtesy to customers 
and, above all, the provisions for their com- 
fort and convenience, were remarkable 
enough to call forth even the Herr Director's 
commendation. The Frau Directorin was in 
the seventeenth Heaven, the Biblical seventh 
not being an elevation high enough to be 
used as a simile when she was shopping in a 
Chicago department store. 

Obliging clerks showed her plates which 
cost three hundred dollars apiece, cut and 



Chicago 173 

etched glass at more fabulous prices ; she 
walked through miles of costly gowns, coats 
and millinery, and having made a few pur- 
chases to her entire satisfaction — we were 
about to leave the store with flying colors, 
figuratively speaking, when pride had a fall. 
Unluckily remembering that a certain small 
boy needed summer underwear, my wife led 
our party to the basement. When we left 
the elevator a polite floor man directed us to 
aisle 16, Wabash Building. As we were on 
the State Street side the cavalcade moved 
past what seemed like miles of commonplace 
merchandise and commonplace buyers to 
aisle 16, Wabash Building. At last we had 
reached our ** Mecca." 

" I should like to see boys' union suits," 
my wife said. 

" Certainly. How old ? " 

" Twelve years." 

** We have nothing here over eight years. 
You will find your size on the sixth floor, 
Washington Street side." 

I think it was the sixth floor ; I know we 
walked (crestfallen) through endless aisles 



174 Introducing the American Spirit 

and were shot up floor after floor. Landed 
finally, the right counter was reached after 
numerous conflicting directions. 

The Herr Director was puffing and pant- 
ing, the Frau Directorin radiant and happy, 
for she enjoys exercise, and my wife, her faith 
in the efficiency of her favorite store not yet 
shaken, though wavering, asking for " union 
suits for a twelve-year-old boyo" 

As the clerk reached for the desired ar- 
ticle she asked: *' Short sleeves or long 
sleeves ?" 

** Short sleeves." 

** Randolph Street side, second floor, for 
short sleeved union suits." 

The Herr Director and I did not accom- 
pany the ladies on their further voyage of dis- 
covery ; we went to the rest room to avoid 
nervous prostration. 

My wife and the Frau Directorin, with the 
determination and endurance which women 
alone possess, continued the chase to a 
victorious finish. 

Fortunately an altogether satisfying lunch- 
eon followed this strenuous experience, after 



Chicago 175 

which, rested and refreshed, we repaired to 
the Art Institute. 

The Chicago Art Institute, within a stone's 
throw of the most congested business section, 
at the edge of its noise and rush, is by its 
very being there a sort of triumph. 

The Herr Director approached it somewhat 
condescendingly, expecting to find it and its 
contents big, bizarre and " nouveau rich- 
essquey As soon as he entered the building 
he felt the dignity and good taste of its ar- 
rangement, and his manner changed. After 
he had looked critically at some of the pictures 
and approved them, I knew myself for once 
on the way to success ; for his praise was as 
genuine as his criticism. 

Knowing that money can buy both Old and 
New Masters, he expected to find them ; but 
he had not expected to see such discrimina- 
tion as was shown in choosing and hanging 
them. He was entirely unprepared for the 
excellent work of our native artists, outside of 
that small but exalted sphere occupied by 
Whistler, Sargent, Innes, etc. 

My joy was complete when we were taken 



176 Introdiicifig the A^nerican Spirit 

into the Art School by the Director, Dr. 
French, whose death not long ago must al- 
ways be deplored. The rooms of the Art 
School were crowded by boys and girls of 
all ages and varied nationalities and races, 
learning to develop their God-given talents 
under the guidance of competent and 
sympathetic teachers. The picture they 
made delighted me more than those they 
drew or painted ; for it seemed so thoroughly, 
generously, democratically and artistically 
American. 

I scored another victory for the American 
Spirit when I introduced my guests to Lorado 
Taft, sculptor, and the guiding star in 
Chicago's artistic firmament. In his rare 
personality, strength and purity, idealism 
and practical good sense blend, and his art 
reflects the man. He showed us some of his 
work and that of his pupils, and both elicited 
unstinted praise from my guests. 

The climax of our visit came when we re- 
turned to the entrance hall which we found 
crowded by public school children, all listen- 
ing to an orchestra composed of certain of 



Chicago 177 

their number, and led by a young girl about 
fourteen years of age. It seemed to me a 
remarkable and beautiful combination. The 
marbles and pictures, the music, and, best of 
all, the children happily wandering about the 
place. When the program ended there was 
ice-cream for everybody, served by the 
teachers who accompanied the children. It 
was a real party, an American party, and we 
might have travelled long and far before I 
could have found anything which would have 
better reflected for my guests the American 
Spirit at its best. 

If I were an artist and a sculptor I should 
like to portray the spirit of Chicago as one 
feels it in this museum. I would model a 
group, with its central figure that same 
sculptor, the finely bred American, clean and 
wholesome, who longs to create, not only 
the city beautiful, but the city human. He 
should be surrounded by the children, happily 
looking at pictures and listening to music as 
we saw them in the Art Institute that day. 

But there must be another prominent 
figure in my group : the heardess, ruthless, 



178 IntroductJig the American Spirit 

twentieth century American, with clean- 
shaven face, jaws strong as a vise, and a 
chin like the base of an anvil. He is the 
man who ** makes a good husband," and 
partly obeys the Scriptural injunction : be- 
cause he provides for his own. He too 
should be surrounded by children ; not his, 
but the children who work in his factories 
and have to live in his rickety tenements. 
The two men would struggle mightily for 
supremacy in the city's life ; and I would set 
up my sculptured group in the busiest place, 
where all who passed it by might see, and 
seeing, help him who was struggUng for 
beauty and for happiness. 

Dr. French, the Herr Director and I had a 
long discussion about my conception of the 
two natures contending within the city. The 
Herr Director argued that the merchant 
spirit, so prevalent here, when uncontrolled 
and uncurbed, is more dangerous to civiliza- 
tion and to our democracy than the military 
spirit of Germany, and that it needs to be 
overcome by a force greater and stronger 
than itself. The corrupting element he said 



Chicago 1 79 

has always been this same merchant spirit, 
and where ancient civilizations decayed, it 
was due to the fact that it debased kings and 
enslaved them by luxuries. 

" Business should not control, but be con- 
trolled, because business is based entirely 
upon selfishness." When the Herr Director 
stopped for breath. Dr. French, who was an 
ardent Christian and knew his Bible, took 
from his pocket a New Testament, and 
pointed out a remarkable chapter in the 
Book of Revelation (a chapter I was com- 
pelled to confess I had not read) that bore 
out the Herr Director's statement. 

*' The kings of the earth committed fornica- 
tion with her, and the merchants of the earth 
waxed rich by the power of her wantonness. 
. . . And the merchants of the earth 
weep and mourn over her, for no man buyeth 
their merchandise any more ; merchandise 
of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and 
pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, 
and scarlet ; and all thyine wood, and every 
vessel of ivory, and every vessel made of 
most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, 



i8o Introducing the American Spirit 

and marble ; and cinnamon, and spice, and 
incense, and ointment, and frankincense, and 
wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and 
cattle, and sheep ; and merchandise of horses 
and chariots and slaves ; and souls of men." 

We urged Dr. French to read the rest of 
the chapter, which he did. 

" And they cast dust upon their heads, 
and cried, w^eeping and mourning, saying; 
Woe, woe, the great city, wherein were made 
rich all that had their ships in the sea by 
reason of her costliness ! for in one hour is 
she made desolate," and then the voice of 
the angel crying into the thick of their 
lament, " Rejoice over her, thou Heaven and 
ye saints, and ye apostles, and ye prophets ; 
for God hath judged your judgment on her." 
It seemed as though the prophet had written 
the epitaph of all cities in which the merchant 
was master and not servant. 

When he had finished I knew the inscrip- 
tion for my sculptured group : the twentieth 
verse of the eighteenth chapter of Revela- 
tion. 

Altogether it was a remarkable day to be 



Chicago 1 8 1 

experienced only in America, perhaps only 
in Chicago. To shop in the largest store in 
the world, visit a picture gallery well worth 
while, and see art students at work ; hear 
classical music pla3^ed by a children's 
orchestra, and watch the same children en- 
joying the party which followed ; to meet 
one of the leading sculptors of America who 
shared with us his plans and hopes, and to 
have as our guide the Director of the Art 
Institute, was a colossal experience worthy 
of the city in which it happened. 

The next day was given to the Juvenile 
Court, Public Play Grounds, the University, 
and, finally, Hull House. The one great dis- 
appointment of the Chicago visit for me and 
my guests was Miss Jane Addams' absence 
in Europe. But the House was there — big, 
neighborly, homelike, hospitable — and the 
residents were there, those who do the 
neighboring, the healing and the helping, 
who are friends of the friendless, and know 
no creed or race — except humanity. 

My faith in Chicago springs largely from 
my contact with Hull House, The Commons 



1 82 Introducing the American Spirit 

and like places with their defiant spirit 
towards evil, their broad-mindedness and 
their brave attempt at remedying the wrongs 
of our commercialized civilization. 

After dinner I ** toted " my guests all over 
the House, from the reading-room on the 
first floor to the Boys' Club on the third, and 
back again. I have done it frequently, and 
always with zest and pride, in spite of the 
fact that I have had no active share in the 
work. 

In Bowen Hall we came upon a dancing 
party. Some one of the social clubs had 
been gracious enough to invite its parents to 
come. We were introduced to Mrs. Frank- 
elstein from Roumania, and Mrs. Flynn from 
Ireland, Mrs. Ragovsky from Russia, Mr. 
and Mrs. Feketey from Hungary, Mr. and 
Mrs. Rocco from Italy, and many others 
whose picturesque names I do not remember. 

We also met a young business man, the 
son of a millionaire, with sundry other young 
men and women of the type one likes to 
meet and introduce, whom one would be 
proud to know anywhere. They had charge 



Chicago 183 

of the affair. The Herr Director and the 
Frau Directorin caught the spirit of the oc- 
casion and entered into it with zest. When 
the orchestra began to play, he led the Grand 
March with Mrs. Rocco and she followed 
with the young millionaire. At the close of 
the festivities, as we were leaving, they vowed 
they had had the best time since they left 
home. 

Chicago, big, blundering, materialistic 
Chicago had a new meaning to the Herr 
Director. He praised everything and every- 
body, and as we parted for the night, he 
said : " * Almost thou persuadest me to ' be- 
lieve in the * American Spirit.' " 



X 

Where the Spirit is Young 



T 



'\0 the average European there are 
two things American which have 
not yet lost their romantic quahty : 
The prairies and the West. 

Anticipations of seeing both, filled the 
breast of the Frau Directorin with mingled 
feelings of fear and pleasure, as she discussed 
with her husband the fate of the children they 
had left behind them — in the event of our be- 
ing captured by the Indians. However, the 
probability of our safe return and her conse- 
quent opportunity to tell envious friends her 
experiences in the prairies and the West out- 
weighed all fears. 

Among her friends were those who had 
braved the perils of the ocean and gone as 
far as New York; some of them had even 
been in Chicago — but beyond, still hidden in 

the romance woven about them by Bret 

184 



Where the Spirit is Young 185 

Harte (her favorite American author), were 
those two things she was about to see, and 
of which they had only dreamed. 

The Herr Director, as he repeatedly re- 
minded me, had crossed the plains when I 
had known them only through Cooper's fas- 
cinating Indian stories, and he was eager to 
throw off the leadership I had assumed, 
which, to a dominant nature like his, proved 
exceedingly irksome. 

He soon discovered that he was travelling 
through territory entirely new to him. The 
little towns he had known had grown into 
cities, and the further west we travelled, 
the greater and more impressive were the 
changes. 

Omaha and Kansas City he did not recog- 
nize at all. Not only was there this new 
growth, " rank growth," he called it, of sky- 
scrapers, post-ofBces and railroad stations 
with Doric pillars — the men and women he 
met had a new outlook upon life. While 
they still boasted of this and that thing in 
which their city was like Chicago or was un- 
like some lesser city than their own, they 



1 86 Introducing the American Spirit 

were critical of themselves and eager to 
learn ; they had grown more masterful and 
at the same time were more refined. 

The prairies were not at all what the Frau 
Directorin had imagined them to be. She 
was chagrined to find nothing but farm lands 
and great fields, not so well groomed as those 
we had seen in the East, but with no Indians 
or bufTaloes, no wild horses or wilder looking 
men. 

She saw no trace of the toil, the struggle 
and the brave resistance through which these 
farms had been rescued from the prairies. 
She could not know of the loneliness of 
women and the hardihood of men, of the 
season's drought and famine, of bitter disap- 
pointment, the pangs of bearing and rearing 
children in utter isolation, and the struggle 
for education. 

No trace of all this was apparent in the 
sort of settled, middle class prosperity which 
stretched out in the unvaried, thousand mile 
panorama through which we journeyed. 

In a town of about four thousand inhabit- 
ants we stopped ; the name of the place is 



Where the Spirit is Young 187 

of no significance, for there are hundreds of 
just such towns in the West. We were met 
by the superintendent of schools, himself a 
product of the prairies. Having grown up 
among the cattle, he is consequently shy of 
men. He drove his automobile as if it were 
a broncho, and we all uttered a prayer of 
thanksgiving when he deposited us, with no 
bones broken, at the hotel. In a short time 
we were ready to go with him to his school, 
which was the objective point of our visit. 

It goes without saying that the superintend- 
ent boasted of the youth of the town, even 
as under like circumstances in the East, he 
would have boasted of its age. 

Ten years before it was nothing except a 
railroad station, miles of sage-brush, rattle- 
snakes and prairie dogs. Now there are 
business blocks, embryonic sky-scrapers, a 
pillared post-office, a hundred-thousand-dollar 
hotel, a Grand Opera House, neither big 
enough nor good enough to boast of, numer- 
ous churches and this schoolhouse. It is 
not only a place in which boys and girls 
learn the *' three R's," but has a finely 



1 88 Introducing the American Spirit 

equipped gymnasium, a chemical laboratory 
and a Domestic Science department. It is 
a center of education and recreation, not 
only for that town, but for the surrounding 
country. 

I had never seen the Herr Director as en- 
thusiastic over anything as he was over this 
cowboy school superintendent, with his pro- 
gram of reaching every man, woman and 
child in the county through his educational 
and recreational program, his annual budget 
of some seventy- five thousand dollars, and a 
faculty of men and women college bred, and 
citizens of the town. They are not merely 
educated tramps, but are there to stay, and 
they take pride in the town in which they 
make their home. 

The Herr Director was no less amused 
than I was when we were told by one of the 
teachers that the superintendent, at one of 
the school board meetings had pulled off his 
coat and threatened to thrash one of the 
members who refused his vote on an impor- 
tant measure. As we looked at this six foot 
three, erstwhile cowboy, his broad shoulders 



Where the Spirit is Young 189 

and strong arms which seemed reluctantly 
confined in a coat, and as we saw his square, 
determined jaw, — we knew that the unruly 
member voted aye. 

Both the Herr Director and I were asked 
to speak to the boys and girls. As soon as 
they entered the room the air became elec- 
tric with their high school yell ; they " rah 
rahed " us individually and collectively, and 
" what's the matter withed " everybody, and 
indulged in all those academic and classical 
performances which every high school now 
seems to consider an essential part of prep- 
aration for college. 

The Herr Director told them that among 
all the things he had seen thus far in Amer- 
ica he liked their high school the best ; 
which remark of course elicited thunderous 
applause. This was most gratifying to him, 
and all day he was in high spirits. He 
thought the most hopeful characteristic of the 
American is this faith in education, the prac- 
tical, far-reaching methods employed, and 
the daring all sorts of educational experi- 
ments. At the same time he severely criti- 



190 Introducing the American Spirit 

cized our lack of unanimity, and the evident 
disadvantages of such communities as have 
no cowboy superintendent to lick a conserv- 
ative or stingy school board member into 
conformity with his plans. 

We visited an agricultural college where 
we were told of farmers who came to study 
soil fertility, and farmers' wives who studied 
kitchen chemistry, farmers' children who 
tested seeds, and to whom these prairies, to 
which they were being bound by an intelli- 
gent knowledge of their environment, were 
beginning to speak a new language. 

We saw a teacher's college which one 
with the prophet's vision had planted in the 
desert. The sage-brush ridden prairie had 
been transformed into a glorious campus, 
and uncultured boys and girls into enthusi- 
astic teachers. More than twelve hundred 
of them come back each year to get better 
equipment for their difficult task. 

The cities in which we stopped interested 
the Herr Director less than the towns, and 
we did not tarry long except in one of them, 
where we had to stay because of an engage- 



Where the Spirit is Young 191 

ment I had made to address a certain club. 
I did this because it gave me a fine chance 
to introduce that particular American insti- 
tution, a combination of eating and speaking 
club, which meets once a month and whose 
program is as ambitious as are most things 
Western. 

We were met at the station by a com- 
mittee of men and women in automobiles of 
course, and found the finest rooms in the 
hotel reserved for us. Big, high, generous 
rooms, in which the Herr Director and the 
Frau Directorin openly rejoiced. 

The committee awaited us in a private 
dining-room where luncheon was served. 
There were three other guests who were to 
speak during the evening. One of them, a 
most brilliant woman, a well-known social 
worker. The second a United States Sen- 
ator, and the third an explorer who had just 
returned from a voyage into some less 
known parts of South America. 

The luncheon was sufficiently elaborate 
and artistically served to satisfy both the 
Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, but 



192 Introducing the A77ierican Spirit 

he protested when after the meal, without 
even a chance at a nap, we were escorted 
to waiting motor cars, and a long cavalcade 
of us started on a sight-seeing expedition. 

The city was worth seeing, with its boule- 
vards, parks and playgrounds ; its school- 
house, churches, and clubs. We heard 
much of its prospects, always so great an 
asset in the life of our Western cities. 

Amusing and remarkable to the strangers 
was the evident pride of this committee in 
the city, to which they had come from all 
parts of the country if not of the world ; yet 
they spoke of it with a lover's affection. 

The one thing underneath all this civic 
pride, and finer than anything visible to us, 
was the fight for decency, law and order, 
and the health and happiness of children, 
which has been waged there and is not yet 
won. It is as exciting as, and more valor- 
ous than, many a battle in which men fight 
with powder and bullets. 

It was an exhilarating experience to shake 
the hand and look into the face of a woman 
who had defied the monied interests of her 



Where the Spirit is Toung 193 

state, who had jeopardized her comforts and 
her position, even her life, to loosen the hold 
of graft from the schools of the state. 

It was inspiring to hear from a mild man- 
nered, unaggressive looking man how he had 
helped wipe out brothels and evil dance 
halls, broken up the connivance of the 
police with the criminal element and put 
through a positive program of rational, 
clean amusements for the people. 

We visited a business plant, the archi- 
tecture and equipment of which are as 
unique as are its owner's business methods. 
We were told the story (not by himself) of 
how a brave and good man, single handed, 
struggled against bosses, political cliques 
and large financial interests in league with 
them, and all but freed the city from its most 
dangerously decent foes. 

We were shown hills which the citizens 
had faith enough to remove and the hollows 
into which they had cast them ; a raging 
river which they meant to control, and ugly, 
sickening slums which were doomed to go, 
and that none too soon ; the old things 



194 Introducing the American Spirit 

which were to become new, and crooked 
things which were to be made straight. 

Thirty-three years before the Herr Di- 
rector had heard stories of vanishing buf- 
faloes and the last struggles with the Indians. 
He had met scouts, hunters and soldiers. 
This was a new type of fighters, much less 
picturesque, but fit successors to those valiant 
pioneers. I rescued my guests from a visit 
to the stock-yards (why any one should care 
to show off stock-yards I do not know), and 
the committee released its hold upon us so 
that we might make our toilettes for the re- 
ception which preceded the banquet. 

If there is anything more conducive to 
creating a barrier to real human contact 
than a reception, I have not seen it, unless 
it be a reception with orchestral accompani- 
ment ; this was such an one, and its chief func- 
tion seemed to be to drown conversation. 

The ladies of our party were happy because 
this was one of the few occasions on our trip 
when they could wear evening gowns. 

The Frau Directorin was astonished be- 
yond measure when she heard that some of 



Where the Spirit is Young 195 

the women on the reception committee of 
this club were mothers (to a limited degree, 
it is true), that they had, at the most, two 
servants, and that some of them had none; 
that they were interested in Literary Clubs 
and civic affairs, served on school boards 
and church committees, and were doing 
various other things to help the Creator 
manage His universe. 

The German woman, who has adhered to 
the progam marked out for her by the Em- 
peror, the ** three K's," " Kuche^ Kirche und 
Kinder ^^ stands aghast at the strenuous lives 
many of our women lead. The Frau Di- 
rectorin, who has servants for the kitchen 
and the children, upon whom the third K, 
the Church, lays no burden in the way of 
missionary meetings, fairs and suppers, who 
does not have to reduce her flesh to be in 
the fashion, and whose social position is de- 
termined by her husband's station in life, 
may well wear an unruffled smile and keep 
an unfurrowed brow. 

At the banquet, the waiters and the or- 
chestra vied with each other in noise mak- 



196 Introducing the American Spirit 

ing, and it was a relief when, with the bring- 
ing of the black coffee, they all disappeared, 
and the toast-master rose and began un- 
bottling his stock of stories. Nowhere in 
the world is there such a thirst for stories 
as in America, and a group of men after a 
banquet has an unlimited capacity for ab- 
sorbing and enjoying them. 

There were four scheduled speakers and a 
few who expected to be called upon unex- 
pectedly, among them the Herr Director ; a 
Glee Club was to sing before, between and 
after the speeches ; so the toast-master did 
not stop telling stories any too soon. 

The first speaker of the evening was a 
woman who well deserved the cheers which 
greeted her appearance. Her address on 
Workmen's Compensation was so clear, so 
aptly put, so well reasoned through and so 
within the limit of time assigned her, that 
when she finished, the enthusiastic Herr 
Director shouted : " Bravo ! bravo ! " loud 
enough to be heard above the less euphonious 
sound of hand clapping, in which form of ap- 
plause the American audience indulges. 



Where the Spirit is Young 197 

The address was an eloquent but un- 
emotional plea for fair play for the work- 
ing man, an arraignment of present practices, 
cruelly sickening in detail, and frightful as a 
revelation of the attitude of large industrial 
interests towards labor. It showed the fair- 
mindedness of the men there, that they lis- 
tened so approvingly, in spite of the fact that 
a large number of them was in similar rela- 
tionship to labor, and that the proposed law 
for which she pleaded would be against their 
own interests. 

After the lady's address, the Glee Club 
sang and then the United States Senator 
was introduced. I have forgotten his sub- 
ject, but that does not matter, for it had no 
relation to what he said. It was the kind of 
address which could be delivered with equal 
propriety at a Grangers' picnic or a political 
meeting. 

There were two things which the senator 
did not know : First, that his audience had 
outgrown that particular kind of address, 
and second, when to stop. When his final 
finally was finally spoken, the Glee Club 



igS Introducing the American Spirit 

sang again, after which the Herr Director 
was called upon to speak. He was listened 
to most attentively as he told how German 
cities are built, governed, provisioned and 
lighted. 

There were at least four speeches beside 
my own, and it was long past midnight 
when the Glee Club sang its last glee, and 
the club adjourned to meet again the next 
month, when it would receive other more or 
less distinguished guests, eat a six course 
dinner and listen to half a dozen speakers, 
each one of them eager to right the wrongs 
of this universe. 

When the Herr Director had said good- 
bye to the hundred or more people who told 
him how much they enjoyed his address, he 
retired in a most happy mood. I found him 
chuckling as he untied his cravat. 

" It was lovely, perfectly lovely," he said ; 
** but what children they are." 

" Yes," I replied, " they are children ; and, 
like children, are eager to learn." 



XI 

The American Spirit Among the 
Mormons 

BOTH the Herr Director and his wife 
had a strange desire to see the Mor- 
mons. They explained it by saying 
that besides the Indians whom they had as 
yet not seen, and the Negroes whom they had 
seen everywhere, they always thought of the 
Mormons as most American, that is most un- 
like other people. 

The Rocky Mountains, as I had expected, 
did not impress them. From the car window 
they seemed more like elevated plains, with 
here and there a restless chain of hills in the 
distance. 

** As restless as the American people," 

quoth the Herr Director. " Your plains and 

your mountains seem to be fighting with each 

other." 

199 



200 Introducing the American Spirit 

I hoped that the plains would win the fight 
and pointed out another, more visible strug- 
gle — that of man with the desert. I ad- 
mitted that the Rocky Mountains which he 
had thus far seen were uninteresting from 
the scenic standpoint, especially as compared 
with the beauty of the Alps, those snow- 
capped mountains with meadows to the 
timber line, their picturesque villages and 
herders' huts all as trim and neat and finished 
as the carving one buys in Interlaken or 
Luzerne. 

From the human standpoint, the Rockies 
are infinitely more interesting, for there the 
elemental struggle is still going on. A giant 
race is taming tumultuous rivers, and forcing 
their waters through flumes and tunnels into 
mighty reservoirs on the mountainsides and 
in the valleys. No indolent, unaspiring, un- 
inventive, docile people could survive in the 
Rockies. 

In common with many Americans, my 
guests believed that this matter of irrigation 
is as easy as turning water from a faucet into 
a basin ; and that all a man has to do is to 



Among the Mormons 201 

drop his seed into the ground and watch it 
grow. I showed them farms, desolate and 
forbidding, which men had to level or lift, 
ditch and plow and harrow ; a back-break- 
ing, often a heart-breaking task. In such an 
environment they built shacks which only 
accentuated the loneliness — where women 
lived and children were born, where hopes 
were cherished and God was worshipped. 

It was an Old Testament environment, the 
wilderness. Compared with these pioneers 
the Israelites had an easy task. They sent 
spies into the Promised Land where they 
found and from which they brought back 
grapes and pomegranates ; but to stay in the 
wilderness, to drive back the drought inch 
by inch, to kill coyotes and rattlesnakes one 
by one, to contend with claim jumpers, real 
estate agents, water right privileges and un- 
scrupulous lawyers, and then raise grapes 
and pomegranates, families, churches, schools 
and colleges — that seems to me the greater 
and more heroic task. And it was done by 
men with the courage of soldiers and the 
vision of prophets, who turned that land 



202 Introducing the American Spirit 

of drought, alkali and sage-brush into one 
** flowing with milk and honey." Because in 
a certain portion of that desert those who 
were the pioneers and performed those tasks 
were Mormons, takes nothing from the glory 
of the achievement. 

As we neared Salt Lake City the Frau 
Directorin looked into every house, eager to 
detect the numerous wives whom she ex- 
pected to see surrounding one man ; while the 
Herr Director marvelled at the beauty of the 
vast Salt Lake valley which, with its poplars 
and mountains and its intensively cultivated 
farms, reminded him of Lombardy, that 
beautiful stretch of country along the railway 
from Milan to Boulogna. 

Salt Lake City is sufficiently different from 
other cities we had seen to arouse interest ; 
but as in Rome the Vatican overshadows 
everything else, so here the Temple and the 
Tabernacle hold one's attention, and work 
upon one's imagination. 

We had scarcely put ourselves to rights in 
our rooms at the Hotel Utah, as pretentious 
and comfortable as any in the country, be- 



Among the Mormons 203 

fore we were out on the streets, looking for 
Mormons. There is a fairly defined type and 
I thought I knew^ it, for I have lectured be- 
fore Mormon audiences ; but out upon the 
busy city streets it was quite impossible for 
me to gratify the curiosity of the Frau 
Directorin by pointing them out to her. I 
did tell her that a third of the population was 
non-Mormon and she looked curiously at 
two out of every three persons we met with- 
out, however, being able to say definitely that 
she had seen a real, live specimen. 

Not wishing to join the crowd of tourists 
who were taken in relays through the 
Tabernacle and other buildings open to the 
curious among the Gentiles, we walked 
through the park, and stopping before the 
monument to Joseph Smith I took the op- 
portunity to enlighten my guests upon the 
history of that singular personality, and the 
church of which he was the founder. 

Evidently my remarks were overheard, 
and before I realized it I was in a discussion 
of Mormon doctrines with a woman, a zealous 
defender of her faith, whose religious zeal 



204 Introducijig the American Spirit 

shone out of her face, which was homely 
enough to need this adornment to save it 
from repulsive ugliness. 

Of course she believed implicitly in the 
Book of Mormon, the plates of which were 
found, and translated from a language which 
the best informed philologists have never 
known to exist ; in a God who has body, 
parts and passions, in spirits which fill 
Heaven, and clamor to be born onto the 
Earth, in the baptism for the dead, and in 
that strange doctrine, that no woman can be 
saved without being sealed to a man, upon 
which the practice of polygamy rested. 

The Herr Director did not quite under- 
stand, and I had to explain each of these 
dogmas as well as I could, and then the 
Frau Directorin, not understanding anything, 
begged to be told about the one thing in 
which she was primarily interested, their 
belief in regard to marriage. I asked the 
lady to explain this doctrine of the Mormons, 
to which she replied that they are not Mor- 
mons, but Latter Day Saints. She was in- 
deed a saint, for she was not offended by our 



Among the Mormons 205 

curiosity, nor the lack of seriousness with 
which we were discussing the subject. 

She addressed the Frau Directorin : ** You 
are married to your husband." The Frau 
Directorin understood and nodded compre- 
hendingly ; "but," the saint continued, "you 
are married to him only for time." 

" No, no, not for a time, not for a time I " 
the Frau Directorin cried, clinging to her 
husband, who had jokingly threatened that 
when they reached Utah he would improve 
the occasion and double his blessings. 

"You could not be married to him any 
other way unless you are sealed according to 
our rites ; we alone marry for eternity." 

" Oh ! " said the facetious Herr Director, 
" you believe in eternal punishment." When 
1 translated that to the Frau Directorin she 
slapped him playfully. 

He asked our guide how many wives he 
could marry if he became a Latter Day 
Saint and she said there would be no limit to 
the wives he could have sealed to him ; but 
according to the latest ruling of the church 
and in conformity with the laws of the United 



2o6 Introducing the American Spirit 

States, only one to live with here upon the 
earth ; so he decided to ** bear the ills he had," 
and not " fly to others that he knew not of." 
The saint could not have expected her 
teaching to take root in soil so shallow, but 
she determined to sow a few more seeds, 
and showed us the interior of the Tabernacle 
with its " largest organ in the world and 
its perfect acoustics." The Frau Directorin 
tried her charming voice and sang, much to 
the delight of the saint, who confessed to 
three consuming passions. She loved to 
sing better than to eat, next in order came 
dancing, which seems to be a specialty 
among Mormons, and evidently does not 
interfere with their piety, and third, that 
of saving feminine souls from destruction, 
on account of their unmarried state. To 
satisfy this last passion she has had ten 
thousand of her female ancestors married to 
well-known Mormons. To accomplish this, 
she had her genealogical tree traced back to 
prehistoric times, and had spent her fortune 
upon that pious extravagance. She told us 
that she was a plural wife, and living with 



Among the Mormons 207 

her husband merely in the celestial relation- 
ship : but she believed polygamy to be in 
harmony with the will of God, and that the 
women as a whole favor it. 

As we returned to our hotel, the Frau 
Directorin amused herself by asking each 
child she met : " How much brothers and 
sisters you are ? " I was profoundly thank- 
ful she did not stop the men to ask them 
about the number of their wives. 

Having promised her that I would intro- 
duce her to a real, live Mormon who as yet 
had only one wife, she could hardly wait 
until dinner, to which I had invited my 
Mormon acquaintance. He proved to be a 
very normal sort of man whose face betrayed 
his European peasant ancestry, his father 
and mother having emigrated from Switzer- 
land, lured across by the promise of land, 
and an all but perfect Zion. They had 
passed through every hardship of the early 
persecutions, and the march across the plains 
and mountains. He himself had grown up 
in the martyrs' faith, which remained un- 
shaken until he was sent to college. 



2o8 Introducing the American Spirit 

Although his teachers were Mormons they 
could not explain away all the inconsistencies 
of Mormon history and belief; doubts as- 
sailed him, and when in due course he be- 
came a missionary and it fell to his lot to go 
to Europe, instead of making converts, he 
became one. The six years abroad were 
spent in the study of history, and, applying 
the methods to his own church and its Book 
of Mormon, he began to doubt, and is a 
doubter still. Yet so strong were the ties 
that bound him that he did not formally 
sever his connection with the church, and 
unless he is ejected from that communion he 
will doubtless remain within its fold. 

He belongs to an increasingly large group 
of young Mormons who, while they them- 
selves have lost faith in the church and its 
doctrines, believe that they must remain 
loyal to those whose belief is still unshaken, 
help them to discard the crudest elements of 
their doctrine and so gradually democratize 
the whole institution. 

The growth of the church has been checked 
and the accession of foreign converts has 



Among the Mormons 209 

almost ceased, due to the prohibition of 
polygamy which was a lure to the evil 
minded, and due also to the fact that immi- 
gration is not being encouraged. 

Mormonism would have continued to grow 
in alarming proportions if the missionaries 
were still offering a husband, or a part of 
one, to every woman, and to every man 
as many wives as he cared to take unto 
himself. 

Within the church two forces are working 
towards its liberalization. The influence of a 
strong, Gentile population, and the school ; 
while neither of them will destroy Mormon- 
ism, our informant believed that ultimately 
it will prove no more formidable or danger- 
ous to the nation than any other religious 
denomination, whose government is strongly 
centralized. 

After dinner he took us to his own home, 
and either from a recently acquired habit, or 
from renewed curiosity, the Frau Directorin 
asked the little son of the house, " How much 
brothers and sisters you are? " and I am not 
sure she was convinced that his wife whom 



2 TO Introducing the America'. S^lrk 

he introduced to us was the only \rife he 
had. 

He was good enough to insist upon taking 
us into the countn' in his machine to call on 
his father, his mother having died some 
years before ; which, however, according to 
Mormon usage oi bygone days did not 
leave the old man a widower. 

His gnarled, wrinkled face shone when we 
greeted him in his native tongue, and it was 
as pleasant as it was instructive to hear him 
tell of the emigration of his people from 
Switzerland to Missouri, of the stormy days 
there, the struggles against infuriated mobs, 
the long, dangerous journey across the 
desert, and the pioneer days in Utah where 
he had acquired lands, sheep and oxen, 
wives and children, in true Old Testament 
fashion. 

The Frau Directorin asked : ** How much 
wives you are ? " 

\Mien he told her that he had gfone be- 
yond the afx>stolic twelve, although he 
lived with only a few of the number, she 
exclaimed : " Um Goites Himmuls Willcn / " 



Awmng the Mormons z 1 1 

The HeiT Director wanted to know how 
he managed so many of them when he had 
difficulty in managing one. 

*• AcJi / in tliose days," he said, " tiie wives 
were subject to tlieir husband, knowing that 
witliout him they could not live comfortably 
here, nor saiely hereafter. They were docile 
enough, and it did not cost so much to keep 
them as it does now." 

With a shrewd smile playing around his 
almost toothless mouth he added : " You 
know if polygamy had not been prohibited 
it would have died out gradually, because 
these are ditterent times. We couldn't a£ord 
it now." 

The old man said he had known Joseph 
Smith and. of course, Brigham Young. He 
spoke of them with reverence and awe. as 
men of God who received revelations and 
could work wonders. There seemed to be 
little or nothing of the mystic in his make- 
up ; his religion was of a hard, materialistic, 
matter-of-fact kind to which he clung most 
tenaciously. There was an unmistakable 
coarseness about him which revealed itself 



212 Introducing the American Spirit 

in his conversation. It may have been due 
to his peasant origin, but during all the years, 
a really ethical religion would have refined 
him. In a sense he still did not belong to 
the United States — he was a Mormon first 
and last, and the government in Washington 
was to him as Pharaoh's rule was to the 
Jews. 

His religion evidently had taught him 
submission. He paid his tithes ungrudg- 
ingly, and had gone on a mission uncom- 
plainingly. He was a cog in a great wheel 
whose resistless force he did not question. 

From his farm we w^ere taken to others, 
and to neighboring towns. The whole 
system in all its minute details was ex- 
plained to us, and the Herr Director was 
quite fascinated by its efficiency, although 
I am sure he would not care to be governed 
by it. Everywhere we found prosperous 
conditions and outward contentment, but 
underneath, especially among the young 
people, a brooding discontent and smoul- 
dering rebellion ; yet at the same time much 
stolid ignorance and fanaticism. 



Among the Mormons 213 

Our final visit was to the University, built 
solidly against the rocks, its great U in 
purest white marked upon the mountain- 
side, its very existence seeming a menace 
to the system which supports it. 

There was a fine group of students, both 
Mormons and Gentiles. The library in 
which I spent some time astonished me. 
I wondered, as I looked at some of the 
books, if the church authorities knew what 
was between the covers. Dynamite under 
the Temple walls could not be as dangerous 
as those volumes. 

Possibly the students are as ignorant of 
their contents as the leaders are. There 
are books on Philosophy and Psychology 
which do not seem to me so menacing as 
those on Economics and Sociology ; for it is 
upon these subjects that the questioning will 
come first, and also the discontent. 

After long and confidential conferences 
with some of the professors who told me 
their views, and how they are struggling to 
maintain their academic freedom, and after 
long talks with bright, energetic boys and 



214 hitrodncing the Aynerican Spirit 

girls who expressed themselves freely, I 
could assure the Herr Director that some 
problems, which have so long vexed the 
United States and have threatened certain 
ideals of the American Spirit, are in process 
of solution. 

They are being solved by virtue of the 
broad tolerance of that spirit, than which 
nothing is so feared by the reactionary 
forces in the Mormon Church. 

One thing which that institution desires 
more than anything else is renewed perse- 
cution ; not too much of it, but enough to 
rally the children of the martyrs to face new 
martyrdom and so perpetuate the waning 
power of the church. 

One must remember that Mormonism is 
not only a sect, but a strongly knitted so- 
ciety, and that men who have long ago 
ceased to believe in its doctrines still hold to 
it with a loyalty born of past suffering, which 
will be fostered by any future injustice or 
persecution. 

When we left Salt Lake City and were 
safe in the Pullman on our way to the Pa- 



Among the Moi'rnons 215 

cific Coast, the Frau Directorin put her stock 
question to the colored porter when he came 
to make up the berths. 

" How much wives you are ? " 

When I interpreted the question for him 
he smiled his broadest smile, but looked puz- 
zled. I told him that the lady thought him 
a Mormon. 

" Xo, via' am. I's a Baptist. But I sho'd 
like to be one. I likes de ladies poheful." 

He was not a Mormon, certainly not a 
saint, but he rendered us loyal service on 
that long, dusty journey to the Coast. Per- 
haps because he "likes de ladies poheful," 
or it may have been because I gave him half 
of a generous tip in advance. 



xu 

Tie CaUfhmia Ci»f^ss^f^n (^f FjisJ: 

SINCE landing in New \\ :. e Hen 
Director and die F- 
endured many a ionnai recepcioo ; sbe 
with angdic patience, and he with die nsoal 
masculine avarsion to Ionnai sodal amen- 
ities^ 

\Mien I announced tiiat a leoqitioD was 
to Lv rendered us in San Fiandsco> he ciied 
with uplifted hands, "* l/m G^^es HWm/'* 
He did not object to leallT meeting people ; 
but to stand in line an hour c^ t^ro shaking 
hundreds of ou isUe t died bAiics .-^Tring 

nor caring much to whom they : cec 
seemed to him a profidess e3Dercise ; 
waf»s and tea, or our punc^i — wit:: > c^ 

ingredients which give the "pu..^ :.^ 

attendant i: / s. vV-i5:o::< . — :rv 

T^"> ";-" /uuir re\x~r: ,' ■ ■■."> "■ :" : 



I 



The Calif Grnia Confession of Faith z i 7 

us by the Chinese, and a committee of 
stately, solemn looking gentlemen ciUled for 
us in carriages ; despite the Herr Director's 
reluctance, I am sure he v^-as delighted to 
have this chance of giving his jaded social 
appetite a new sensation. 

Chinatown, with its gay coloring, its tempt- 
ing shops, its stolid-looking men, its quaint 
women and cunning babies, was made 
doubly fascinating to us, entering it offi- 
cially conducted and riding in state. 

I do not know to this day to just what 
facts or virtues or position in lite we owe 
the attentions we received ; but it was all 
recorded upon posters and handbills liberal! v 
distributed through Chinatown, announcing 
our advent. Recorded upon them in those 
picturesque characters with which the Chi- 
nese language puzzles its readers, were the 
names and eulogies of certain members of 
our party. The character which stood for the 
Herr Director looked like a top, a tree and 
a barrel, while his nati\'ity and manifold vir- 
tues were made known in other artistic 
svmbols. 



2 1 8 Introducing the American Spirit 

I suspect that the man to blame for it all 
was a certain young American whose mixed 
ancestry has created a rare and most effect- 
ive personality. He has inherited all the 
grace of his French ancestors, the tenacity 
(a virtue in which he excels) of his Dutch or 
double Dutch progenitors, and I am sure he 
can claim kinship with the first man who 
" kissed the Blarney stone." He could pull 
the latch-string to any foreign colony in that 
great conglomerate of peoples, and always 
be greeted as one of them. The Young 
Men's Christian Association, in whose name 
he served, could not have had a more worthy 
exponent of its social creed, and America 
could not have projected against these for- 
eigners a better representative than Charles 
W. Blanpied. 

The reception was held in the Chinese 
Presbyterian Church, and upon our arrival 
we found it crowded by a solemn-looking 
company of Chinese. We were conducted 
to the platform and introduced to his Excel- 
lency the Consul-General, ministers of various 
denominations, and dignitaries of Chinatown. 



The California Confession of Faith 219 

This was the first reception we attended 
where introductions were not followed by 
vigorous hand-shaking. I am inclined to be- 
lieve that the softness of the Oriental palm is 
due to the fact that it is not vigorously 
pressed every time two men meet each other. 

The Herr Director was in ecstasy over the 
beautiful Chinese girls in the choir. Doubt- 
less he would have preferred sitting among 
them, rather than where he was, between the 
Consul-General and the chairman of the 
evening. 

The reception opened with prayer, as if it 
were a church service ; then the choir sang 
an anthem, followed by four speeches of wel- 
come. The first by his Excellency the Con- 
sul-General lasted an hour and seemed much 
longer, because it was in Chinese and unin- 
telligible to us. 

I was asked to respond, and, under the cir- 
cumstances, my remarks were brief. The 
clever interpreter made a good deal of them, 
judging by the length of time it took him, 
and the tumultuous applause with which 
every sentence was greeted. 



220 Introducing the American Spirit 

The Herr Director told me it was the 
poorest speech he ever heard ; but I am in- 
clined to believe that he was a little jealous 
because he was not asked to speak ; or per- 
haps he was merely trying to keep me 
humble, a course which he had consistently 
pursued from the day I met him in New 
York. 

The reception closed with the benediction, 
and the dignitaries and guests proceeded to 
a Chinese restaurant which was genuinely 
Oriental ; not one of those nondescript Chop 
Suey places which serve such varied and 
often objectionable purposes. The entire es- 
tablishment was reserved for us. It was gayly 
decorated with the banners of the Youngest 
Republic, an orchestra played vigorously 
and so unmelodiously that the Herr Director 
was reminded of the ultra modern German 
compositions. 

The menu was the most mysterious thing 
of the evening, ranging from tea to broiled 
seaweed, and eggs which looked their age 
and were not ashamed of it. There was 
fowl which was made unrecognizable to both 



The California Confession of Faith 221 

the eye and the palate, something which 
tasted like glue flavored with onion, and 
something else which to my perverted Occi- 
dental palate seemed like stewed Turkish 
towels. There were sweetmeats before and 
after and between courses. Beside the mys- 
tery, the variety and novelty of the banquet, 
it had one other virtue ; it was not followed by 
after dinner speeches, that common American 
practice which is an assault upon one's diges- 
tion, and, not infrequently, upon good taste. 
^ While there were no after dinner speeches, 
we had a chance to discuss the problem of 
the Chinese in California, and their brave 
attempts to become Americanized in thought 
and feeling, in spite of the unyielding race 
prejudice they have had to meet ; thus re- 
newing our faith in our common origin and 
destiny, regardless of our apparent differ- 
ences. Never before had I realized how 
gentle these Chinese are nor how altogether 
likeable, and it was no surprise to find that 
some of the Californians have made the same 
discovery, and are treating them accordingly. 
We visited the Immigrant Station at San 



222 Introducing the American Spirit 

Francisco and I wished we had not ; for our 
treatment of the incoming Orientals lacks all 
those elements of which I had boasted. We 
are neither humane, nor fair, neither wise, nor 
decent. We found young Chinese women 
who had been detained for more than a year, 
and were left without occupation or suitable 
companionship or even a hope of early re- 
lease. There were Chinese boys who were 
herded with hardened, vicious-looking men, 
and the station, although ideally situated, 
was little better than a prison. What was 
done or was allowed to be done to make the 
lot of these people more bearable was ac- 
complished by outsiders. Conditions may 
have changed since that time, and if they 
have, it is a cause for profound gratitude. 

We also had an unusual opportunity to 
come in touch with the Japanese all along 
the coast. In one city we met a young 
Japanese, a graduate of my own college. He 
is now serving his countrymen there as a 
Buddhist priest. He has brought to his 
sacred calling much of the practical religion 
which he absorbed through his contact with 



The California Confession of Faith 223 

the college Y. M. C. A., and it is his ambition 
to make Buddhism efficient and serviceable. 
He has put into the work all his patrimony 
and is eager to build up an institution pat- 
terned after the Young Men's Christian 
Association. 

We had many a confidential talk, and if 
the soul of the Oriental is not altogether 
inscrutable I have had a glimpse of it ; 
although I cannot say that I have fathomed 
his soul any more than he has mine. He 
seemed to me to typify his race in a remark- 
able degree. His is a strong, unyielding, 
definite kind of ethnos, and while we liked 
each other and tried to understand one 
another, there seemed to be a place just be- 
fore we reached our Holy of Holies where 
we stood before a barred gate. 

When he told me that the American soul 
is absolutely unemotional in comparison with 
the Japanese, I knew he did not understand 
us ; even as I did not understand the Japa- 
nese when I told him that his people are cold 
and unemotional in comparison with us. 

He took us to his temple in the basement 



2 24 Introduc'mg the American Spirit 

of a shabby looking American tenement 
He showed us his Sunday-school room, 
picture cards with Golden Texts, club and 
class rooms, and many devices borrowed 
from us, applied and perhaps improved upon 
by his Japanese genius. The day we left 
the city he brought us an invitation to 
luncheon at the home of the most prominent 
Japanese merchant in the place. Our hostess 
was a delightful woman educated in a Meth- 
odist school in her native country, and of 
course spoke English. Her husband, a con- 
servative Buddhist, although he had been in 
this country for twenty years, was still Japa- 
nese to the core and spoke little or no 
English. There were several notables 
present, whose English was more or less 
Japanned. They were keen, well educated, 
and had absorbed enough of American 
culture to be baseball *' fans." 

During luncheon, which in our honor was 
served a la Nippon, we discussed the anti- 
Japanese legislation which at that time was 
menacing the peaceful relationship of the 
two countries. 



The California Confession of Faith 225 

All the Japanese agreed that they had no 
right to demand unrestricted immigration ; 
but they were urgent that no crass distinction 
should be made between them and other 
races, and that they too should have the 
right to obtain citizenship when they had 
proved themselves fitted for it. 

During this discussion the Frau Directorin 
and our host were carrying on a picturesque 
conversation ; that is she did the talking and 
he smilingly said **Yes" to everything she 
said. She felt highly flattered that he under- 
stood her English, which was still about 
seventy-five per cent. German, while his was 
ninety-nine per cent. Japanese. 

That night as we were leaving the city 
a delegation met us at the station to com- 
plete their Oriental hospitality by pre- 
senting us with beautiful and valuable sou- 
venirs. 

After such brief and friendly relationships 
with these people it is easy to come to very 
one-sided conclusions about the problem they 
present to the people of California. The 
situation is serious, but not so serious that, in 



2 26 Introducing the American Spirit 

order to try to meet it, we must cease to be 
gentlemanly in our relation to them. 

It is the peculiarity of all people who face 
race problems, to face them irrationally and 
to think that in order to maintain racial 
dignity one must insult, demean, and humble 
other races; and the people of the United 
States in general, and those of the Pacific 
Coast in particular, have not yet learned a 
better and more rational way. 

Strong race prejudice is not necessarily a 
sign of race superiority, and the people who 
constantly proclaim their superiority by 
humiliating and persecuting others have a 
hard time proving it. 

If what I was frequently told is true, that 
California " wants no immigrants unless they 
are something between a mule and a man," 
then I can understand their animosity 
towards the Japanese ; for they are alto- 
gether human and want to be so treated. 

Beside the many racial varieties with 
which we came in contact on the Pacific 
Coast, we found there all the types produced 
in the United States, and while neither the 



The California Confession of Faith 227 

Herr Director nor myself was able to dif- 
ferentiate them by external variation, we 
discovered them by different and contending 
ideals. From that standpoint they were 
even more interesting than the Orientals. 
Every shade of political and religious opin- 
ion, every kind of economic doctrine, every 
variety of social standards we found, besides 
currents and cross currents not easily dis- 
cerned or classified. In spite of the differ- 
ence in race, class, religion and politics, we 
found three well defined ideas expressed, 
upon which there is such an agreement that 
they might be called the California Confes- 
sion of Faith. 

First and foremost is the belief in the 
climate and the resources of the state. 
There is no religious doctrine in existence 
unless it be the monotheism of the Jews, 
which is so dogmatically held as this faith, 
that California is unsurpassed in climate, 
productiveness, in all those opportunities for 
a leisurely existence (provided you have 
worked hard elsewhere to get the necessary 
money) as are offered by its mountains and 



228 hitroducing the American Spirit 

sea, its luxuriant homes and all other factors 
which contribute to the health and happiness 
of mankind. The only possible rival to 
California is Heaven itself, and just because 
in these unbelieving and unregenerate days 
so many people are not sure that there is 
such a place, or if there is, are in doubt that 
they will have a mansion reserved for them, 
they are leaving the farms and towns of the 
more mundane Middle West and prosperous 
East to get a taste of Heaven in California 
before they go to that ** bourne from which 
no " wanderer has returned. 

The people of California forgive any 
heresy or unbelief except a doubt, however 
faint, about its climate and resources. From 
the shadow of Mount Shasta to the deepest 
depth of the Imperial Valley, whether we 
were so cold in summer as to need furs, or 
were hot enough to melt, or were choking 
from dust when we travelled through miles 
of unredeemed desert, we found this faith in 
the climate and resources of California un- 
shaken. 

The Herr Director asked why there were 



The Calif orjiia Confession of Faith 229 

so many cemeteries in the midst of the most 
crowded streets, and only a nearer look con- 
vinced him that they were " for sale " signs 
of rival real estate agents, who flourish 
equally with the sage-brush and cactus. 

The second idea upon which there is a 
common agreement is, that while California 
in particular is perfect as to climate and re- 
sources, the world in general is a dire place, 
and its wrongs need to be righted. 

In spite of the fact that the climate invites 
to leisure, it has not as yet tamed the fight- 
ing spirit of this fine, manly race, which is 
never so happy as when it has something 
to do and dare. This state has admitted 
women to the duties of citizenship, that all 
may have an equal share in the fight. The 
issues at stake are worth battling for, and 
nowhere else is the struggle more intense 
and dramatic. Organized labor and capital 
have crippled each other in the desperate 
conflict, fierce always, and often brutal. 
Protestantism, unorganized and frequently 
inefficient, faces the Roman Catholic hier- 
archy, defending, as it believes, the public 



230 Introducing the Amej'ican Spirit 

schools and democratic government itself: 
awakening, purified democracy is in deadly- 
conflict with the demagogue entrenched by 
special privilege while the prohibitionists are 
engaged in most desperate conflict with the 
vinous industry of the state. 

The third doctrine of the California Con- 
fession of Faith is, that here on the Pacific 
Coast the white race has been providentially 
placed to defend this country against the 
encroachment of the ** Yellow Peril." It was 
illuminating though painful to find that race 
prejudice is as intense here as in the South, 
and as unreasoning, and that one is as help- 
less against it as against a flood or fire. All 
one seems to be able to do is to accept it 
as a fact, and treat it like a contagious 
disease. 

If there is any danger to the white race at 
the Pacific Coast, it is not the presence of the 
Japanese or Chinese in limited numbers ; it 
is the attitude of mind which has been created 
among Americans there, and that may bring 
its own vengeance. 

It was a great joy to introduce my guests 



The California Confession of Faith 231 

to California, its orange groves and vine- 
yards, its marvellous cities and palatial 
homes. It is a state to glory in ; but strange 
to say I was somewhat depressed when I left 
it. The Herr Director said he missed my 
'* brag and bluster." 

Everything was beautiful and bountiful, 
even as the real estate agents have adver- 
tised ; yet there were some things I found and 
some things I missed which took the " brag 
and bluster" out of me. 

Its pioneer spirit is weakened by the acces- 
sion of a large, leisure class, and how or 
where the next generation will find a grap- 
pling place for vigor of body, mind and 
spirit, is still a great question. To eat one's 
bread by the sweat of some ancestor's brow, 
to be challenged daily by the luxury of a 
limousine rather than by the hardships of the 
prairie schooner, to have as the end and aim 
of one's day the winning of a Polo match, or 
the making of a golf score, must ultimately 
bring about a decadence of spirit, even 
though one retains for a while litheness of 
body and activity of mind. 



232 Introducing the American Spirit 

The boasted democracy of California is 
threatened, not only by the presence of a large 
leisure class and the necessary serving if not 
servant class, but also by a lack of faith in 
humanity, without which no democracy is 
safe and enduring. To California has been 
transferred all that unfaith gendered by the 
advent of the negro, and if there were 
ever a chance to revive the institution of 
slavery, that state might ofier some hope for 
its revival. 

The Californians who fear for the white 
race because of the presence of the Oriental, 
whom that fear has made vain, boastful, un- 
generous and reckless of the feelings of 
others, need to know that a greater danger 
threatens the race — the decay of the demo- 
cratic spirit, which languishes and perishes 
unless it permits to all men free access to the 
best it holds, regardless of " race, color, or 
previous condition of servitude." 

Because I had lost my ** brag and bluster " 
and wished to recover them, I took my 
guests, who were now homeward bound, to 
the one place which might fitly crown their 



The California Confession of Faith 233 

experiences — the Grand Canyon, where one 
is apt to forget humanity and its fretting 
problems. 

I must confess that by this time I was 
quite worn out ; for introducing your coun- 
try to a stranger is wearing business, es- 
pecially when you are dealing with Mask 
globe-trotters, who have done all the big 
things, from the Alps to the Dead Sea, and 
have had to crowd into a brief month the 
best which lies between New York and Cali- 
fornia. To do this with a lover's adulation, 
endeavoring more or less skillfully to hide 
defects and make the bright spots brighter 
still, may well tax one's nerves. 

I acted as a sort of shock absorber, for I 
determined that the journey should be a jolt- 
less one for my guests ; but in that I partially 
failed ; for not only did I receive the shocks 
myself, I could not keep them from receiving 
some. 

One of the worst of these jolts I suffered 
at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. I 
was very sure of the Canyon itself ; I knew it 
would put a thrill into the Herr Director, and 



2 34 Introducing the American Spirit 

force an expression of it out of him. I never 
worried about the Frau Directorin. We 
reached the Canyon in that happy mood 
gendered by a combination of Harvey meals 
and Pullman berths, and the sight of the 
friendly inn at the brink of the big surprise, 
and the cheer of the big log fire in the raftered 
room drew an involuntary exclamation of 
pleasure from the Herr Director. He regis- 
tered, then asked the clerk for a room front- 
ing the Canyon. 

" Yes siree 1 " said the obliging young man 
as he attached a number to the Herr Direct- 
or's long and illegible signature ; •' I'll give 
you a room so near that you can spit right 
into it." 

Naturally I received the first shock ; a 
minute later it communicated itself to the 
Herr Director. It did not reach the Frau Di- 
rectorin, for her English fortunately was still 
limited ; she kept on looking at the bright 
Navajo rugs, while the clerk smiled at his 
own smartness. The Herr Director com- 
manded to have his bags taken to his room, 
and turning from the desk said : " Young 



The California Confession of Faith 235 

man, I am a German, and I want you to un- 
derstand that we do not spit in God's face." 

The next morning the great Canyon was 
full of mist, and only faint outlines of its titanic 
architecture were visible. As we stood at the 
edge of the wondrous chasm, watching the 
last cloud being driven from the depths as 
the moisture was absorbed by the dry, desert 
air, the Frau Directorin was shaken by emo- 
tion as she gasped at intervals : " Um 
Gottes Himmels Willen ! " The Herr Di- 
rector, his feelings better controlled, said 
nothing; but after a long silence, muttered 
under his breath : ** I should like to throw 
that clerk down this abyss as a penalty for 
his desecrating thought." 

Every few minutes I heard him saying, as 
he shook his head : ** Just think of it ! Just 
think of it ! " 

I did not disturb him or ask him what he 
thought of it for I knew he could not tell, 
nor can any one. I think he felt as I felt, 
that all the cities he had seen were as noth- 
ing compared with this wonder of nature ; 
that all the pillared post-offices and libraries 



236 Introducing the American Spirit 

which our cunning hands have scattered over 
this broad land are trifling toys compared 
with this templed miracle ; that all our dreams 
of what we might paint or fashion or carve, 
or build, are child's play compared with this, 
and that we ourselves are mere nothings in 
the presence of what God hath wrought here 
in stone and clay, in color and form. 

Never before had I so wished that I could 
rearrange the geography of the United 
States as when we turned eastward from the 
Grand Canyon. If I had the power of Him 
who shaped this earth I would have put it 
within a mile of the Atlantic Ocean and 
within a stone's throw of the Hoboken dock, 
and having shown my guests the Canyon, I 
would have put them on board their home- 
bound steamer, and as they sailed away I 
would have cried out with ancient Simeon : 
" Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in 
peace 1 " 



XIII 

The Grinnell Spirit 

BETWEEN the Grand Canyon and the 
ship there might be ** many a slip," 
especially as I was to conclude my 
guardianship of the travellers in my own 
town, prosaically placed in the great Missis- 
sippi Valley, which consists of two plains — 
one at the top and the other at the bottom, 
filled with corn and hogs, and most prosper- 
ous and contented people. 

The place towards which we journeyed 
holds two things which are the biggest, most 
beautiful, and best things in the world — my 
home and my work, both of which my guests 
wished to see. I was anxious that they 
should ; for there, if anywhere, they could 
come close to that I gloried in most, the 
American Spirit. 

After the barren plains, the monotonous 

237 



238 Introducing the American Spirit 

miles of sage-brush, and the long, straight 
stretches of railroad tracks, it was good to 
look upon green meadows and commodious 
farmhouses sheltered by groves of maple 
and elm, and surrounded by great fields of 
young corn just peeping above the black, 
rich clods. 

During the last few hours of the trip the 
Herr Director thought every station at which 
the train stopped was our destination, and 
began gathering his various belongings. 
When finally we reached it he jumped out 
almost before the train stopped, so eager was 
he to see the place where he was to spend at 
least a fortnight, and really see the American 
home from the inside. 

Again fortune favored me. It was early 
June. The air was soft from recent rains, 
the grassy lawns were wonderfully green ; 
peonies were opening their buds, adding 
touches of color, snowballs hung thick upon 
the bushes, and blooming roses filled the air 
with sweet odors. 

It seemed as if our neighbors had con- 
spired to make the town ready for my dis- 



The Grinnell Spirit 239 

tinguished visitors, and I could see that they 
enjoyed the peace of it, the friendHness of 
the park-like streets, the sight of well-kept 
homes set in gardens, and the cordial greet- 
ings of the people we met. 

Their appreciation of all they saw before 
reaching the house, and their evident delight 
in the rooms prepared for them, not to men- 
tion their astonishment at finding their trunks 
awaiting them there, afforded me not only 
pleasure, but a great sense of relief ; I felt 
that the race was won. I had faith to believe 
that they would be happy in our town of six 
thousand inhabitants, which is not unlike 
other places of the same size. It has its 
public park, two or three shopping streets, 
churches, schoolhouses, a few factories large 
and small, clubs, lodges, and all the things 
of which like towns may legitimately boast; 
yet it has a background peculiarly its own. 

It was founded by an intrepid pioneer who 
brought a colony of New Englanders from 
the hills of Massachusetts to this treeless 
prairie, and with the imperious will of his 
race said : ** Let there be a town I " And 



240 Introducing the American Spirit 

lumber was carted over miles of deep mud, 
cabins were built and there was a town. 

And again he said : ** Let there be a rail- 
road!" And he diverted the course of a 
great railroad system miles out of its way, 
and there was a railroad. 

And he said : ** There must be no saloon in 
this place ! " So more than half a century 
before strong drink was acknowledged to be 
a social and physical foe, he had seen its 
true nature and put prohibition into every 
deed of real estate, thus making it impossible 
for liquor to gain a foothold. 

Years passed and he said : ** Let there be 
a college I " and he brought one across the 
state, and there was a college ; a young, 
infant thing just started by Christian mis- 
sionaries who had come from the East, each 
of them to plant a church, all of them to 
plant a college. 

This infant educational institution was put 
into its rude cradle in the midst of an un- 
shaded campus, and when it had grown to 
generous size, with buildings to house it and 
trees to shade it, a cyclone swept the campus 



The Grinnell Spirit 241 

bare, and instead of a joyous Commence- 
ment, which was but a few days distant, 
there were funerals and desolation, wreck 
and ruin. 

On a pile of debris sat the same pioneer 
with a determined smile playing upon his 
face, and at once, while the tears upon the 
mourners' cheeks were still wet, he and 
others like him began rebuilding the town 
and the college. 

Those men now "rest from their labor" 
in that bit of rolling prairie saved from the 
plowmen and the harvester, and consecrated 
to hold our dead until the great day. 

The morning after our arrival in Grinnell, 
the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, 
who, during our travels, had little opportuntiy 
to indulge their fondness for exercise, walked 
out to the cemetery. It is a beautiful, well- 
kept spot, but half spoiled by crowding head- 
stones. From it can be seen church steeples 
peeping through the elm trees which shelter 
the town ; the ugly stand-pipe and the tall 
chimney of our one big factory. At our feet 
lay the little artificial lake where much fishing 



24- Ir::r..:u::':r :'■:- A^Ki^'ic^n Spirit 

is done, and sometimes fish are caught As 
far as we could see were prosperous farms 
with their comfortable homes, generous barns, 
turreted silos, and wide meadows where 
calves and colts grazed. 

One of our virtues, the Herr Director 
thought, was that we do not boast about our 
dead. Whatever boasting we do, and we do 
not boast too much, it ceases when the eanh 
covers us. He saw no fulsome eulogies 
carved upon the headstones ; often nothing 
but a name and the two dates of birth and 
death. 

In the face of that great and last achieve- 
ment we are very humble and honest ; 
although in our little cemetery lie buried 
men and women of whom I should like to 
boast- They were the great, real Americans 
who worked diligently, honestly and humbly, 
who left no huge fortunes to curse the next 
generation ; but built their modest homes, 
and before the roof tree was lifted, had built 
a church and a schoolhouse. They put 
their tithes into the Lord's treasury- before 
they put money into a bank, and while they 



The Grinnell Spirit 243 

were still wading through mud, anchored the 
college upon a rock, making its growth and 
permanence their great extravagance. 

They believed in an austere Christ, but be- 
lieved in Him implicitly, followed Him con- 
sistently and left a legacy of simplicity, tem- 
perance and frugality. 

Yes, I boasted of our dead to my guests. 
I boasted of that grim, fighting man whose 
name the town bears, who was the personifi- 
cation of the determined, American pioneer, 
the conqueror of mere circumstances. 

I boasted of that firm, unyielding, con- 
troversial Calvinist, George F. Magoun, who 
ruled the college in his own stern way. He 
was the last, but not the least of his kind, 
who built deep and strong and straight upon 
the foundations of morality and religion ; so 
that others could build loftily and boldly. 

I led them to the grave where rests the 
body of his successor, the two differing from 
one another in opinions and method at every 
point ; for the younger man was the forerun- 
ner of a new dispensation, its prophet, dis- 
ciple and martyr. Yet both men were made 



244 Introducing the American Spirit ^, 

■I! 

of the same stern, unyielding stuff, and both 
rested their lives and the hope of life's better 
things to come, upon the same foundation. 

When the names of those Americans who 
prophesied the day of the Kingdom, who 
worked for it and suffered for it, shall be 
placed upon the honor roll, the name of 
George A. Gates, now carved upon a modest 
monument, will be found imperishably writ- 
ten there. 

Near by, under the shade of slender white 
birches, we saw the simple shaft which marks 
the resting place of one of the Iowa Band, 
James J. Hill, who holds his place in the 
annals of the college, not only because he 
gave the first dollar to help found it, but be- 
cause of the continued loyalty of his sons. 

I wished my guests could have come to us 
before we buried the man whose life spanned 
the old and the new — the white-haired, ever 
youthful, eloquent teacher, Leonard F. Parker, 
who smiled benignly upon us all until his 
eyes closed forever, and with their closing, a 
benediction was gone. He was the type of 
missionary teacher who began his career in a 



The Grinnell Spirit 245 

log cabin, who, whether he taught in a coun- 
try school or in a great State University, 
taught with a passion for men. The impress 
of his personality remained with his pupils 
long after they had forgotten his erudite 
lore. 

As great as these great Americans were their 
wives, and no one can ever think of them 
as less than the equals of their husbands. 

If the American woman occupies a unique 
place in the world, it is not only because the 
American man has been more generous than 
his European brother, but because she has 
proved her equality. She has attained the 
measure of rights and privileges still denied 
to most of her sisters elsewhere because she 
earned and deserved them. 

We, the living, sons and daughters of these 
great teachers by birth and by adoption, can- 
not hold in too high esteem the legacy they 
left us. We do not know with as firm an as- 
surance as we ought to know, how much we 
owe to them, and that, if we waste our in- 
heritance, we waste spiritual forces which we 
cannot generate. 



246 Introducing the American Spirit 

They were all, in the true sense, provincial, 
narrow men. They thought of America and 
of the world and of the world to come, in the 
terms of their creed, their town and their col- 
lege ; while we who have circled the globe 
and think in world terms first, and boast f 
of wider vision and larger faith, may be in 
danger of overlooking the fact that in our 
small place and places like it may be decided 
the fate of America, and through America, the 
fate of the world. 

The Herr Director was astonished and the 
Frau Directorin pained to find that we lived 
in a servantless house and in practically a 
servantless town ; that we were our own 
cooks and housemaids, butlers and gardeners. 
When the Herr Director saw me mowing my 
lawn in broad daylight he wondered that I 
did not lose caste among my fellows. 

The Frau Directorin was remarkably 
adaptable. She delighted in wielding the 
dustless mop (to reduce ** the meat "), she 
dusted the bric-a-brac, and out of the kind- 
ness of her heart and in spite of our pro- 
tests, became " first aid " to my wife. 



The Grinnell Spirit 247 

One morning, just as I was waking, I heard 
the rattle of a lawn-mower under my win- 
dow ; not the quick, sharp, sustained noise 
which usually arouses the neighborhood, but 
a slow, measured sound, by fits and starts. 
In between I could hear puffing and pant- 
ing, like that of a small steam engine. 
When I looked out of the window I saw 
something which my eyes could not believe. 
The Herr Director had begun mowing the 
lawn, and I let him finish it. It pretty nearly 
finished him ; but after his bath and a gener- 
ous American breakfast, he glowed from 
health and happiness. 

** I never knew," he said, " the elevating 
power of physical labor. I think I will take 
a lawn-mower home with me." 

The Frau Directorin put a damper upon 
his enthusiasm by reminding him that he 
would have to take a lawn home with him 
too, and more than that, the town itself ; for 
in their environment he would not dare use 
the lawn-mower even if he had one. 

I am quite sure now that the Herr Director 
would have liked to take my little town home 



248 Introducing the American Spirit 

with him, with the lawn-mower and the lawn. 
If he could have done so, he might have 
changed the course of empires. 

I urged him, if he really wished to annex 
us, to do it soon ; for there is no little danger 
that we, too, shall lose faith in the redemptive 
power of labor, the sufificiency of litde things, 
the grandeur of plain living and high think- 
ing, the exaltation of the humble, the inher- 
itance for the meek and the reward of the 
righteous. When we lose those, we have 
lost that which, in our proud, provincial way, 
we call ** The Grinnell Spirit " — an integral 
part of the American — the World-spirit. 



XIV 

The Commencement and The End 

THERE are some aspects of our 
American life which I tried to hide 
from my guests. I kept as many 
of our national family skeletons as possible 
in their closets, and made sure that the doors 
were securely locked. 

I was glad that the Herr Director and the 
Frau Directorin were to leave this country 
before our insane Fourth of July, which we 
are endeavoring to make sane. I did not 
care to have them here on Thanksgiving 
Day from which, through the superabundance 
of turkey and cranberry sauce, the element 
of Thanksgiving has been almost eliminated. 
I was profoundly grateful that during their 
visit there was no election day with its sordid 
partisanship, its ballot box, not yet sacred 
enough to make beautiful or place nobly in 
some civic temple ; but we did urge them to 

remain over Commencement day, that most 

249 



250 Introducing the American Spirit 

happy, sweetly solemn occasion, unspoiled 
as yet by rich display. It is the great fes- 
tival of our democracy, shared by town and 
gown, when we open the gates to rich and 
poor, to common opportunity and duty. 

We made no mistake in thus planning. 
The town wore its holiday air. From farm 
and village, from many states, on every train, 
parents were arriving, walking proudly beside 
their sons and daughters, in academic garb. 

" Old Grads " were being welcomed back 
by Alma Mater, grateful to her for having 
helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth 
living. They hoped to place under her care 
their children and their children's children, 
whom they had brought there to give them 
a foretaste of joys to come. 

It was a wonderful experience for the Herr 
Director and the Frau Directorin to meet 
them. They were feted and feasted ; they 
wore class and college colors, and entered 
into the spirit of it all as if they, too, had been 
the children of Grinnell College. 

Among the graduates they met editors, 
lawyers and doctors who had come back 



The Comniencenient a?id The End 251 

from the great cities ; professors who had 
won academic renown, and are serving the 
great universities ; teachers who had carried 
into the public schools the spirit of their col- 
lege ; preachers who have gained promi- 
nence, and those who minister in humble 
places, faithful in their obscurity and proud 
of their chance to serve. There were mis- 
sionaries who came back from the ends of 
the earth where they had started centers of 
education, places of healing and temples of 
hope. 

They listened to stirring messages from 
pulpit and platform, to the young dreams 
of minor poets who sang the lay of their 
class ; to historians who reviewed the four 
college years as a great epoch closed ; to 
prophets who predicted failure and success, 
and a golden day of jubilee to the whole 
weary world, when this particular class got 
back of it. 

On Commencement day they watched the 
dignified President conferring the degrees of 
Bachelor, Master and Doctor. 

At noon they attended the college ban- 



252 Introducing the American Spirit 

quet and suffered through the after dinner 
speeches. 

That night on the crowded campus they 
enjoyed the Glee Club's joyful songs, and 
then, worn to the last shred of their highly 
emotional natures, walked home with us 
while the last strains of the Alumni Song 
faded away into the night. 

The Herr Director talked until after mid- 
night, telling of the many things which 
pleased him. The religious dignity, the 
fine simplicity, the natural, sweet, pure re- 
lationship between men and women; but 
above all else, the democratic spirit from 
which these other things emanate. 

He had an apt way of singing snatches of 
German song of which he seemed to com- 
mand an unlimited supply ; and as he 
mounted the stairs to his room he sang : 
" Ach^ wenn es 7iur immer so bliebey (Oh, 
if it would only remain so always.) Then 
followed the sad note which is the major 
one of the German lyric : " Es war zu schbne 
gewesen^ es halt nick solle7i sein^ (It was 
too beautiful and therefore could not be.) 



The Commencement and The End 253 

I knew it might not remain so beautiful 
always ; but if life is worth while at all, it is 
worth while struggling to keep it so. 

I do not know what share one person may 
have in influencing the current upon which 
a nation is drifting ; but I believe in the 
power of the individual, and I shall ** fight 
the good fight" — and a hard one it is — and 
*' keep the faith " — although it is not easy to 
keep it — faith in God and men and in the 
American Spirit. 

Four weeks after the Herr Director and 
the Frau Directorin left us I received the 
following letter. I have had some difficulty 
in translating the involved and rather 
lengthy epistle into straightforward Eng- 
lish, but have done so that I may share it 
with my readers. 

My dear Friend : 

We arrived home in safety after a 
rather stormy and uneventful voyage. On 
board the ship we met a number of Lake 
Mohonk acquaintances, and therefore the 
atmosphere which you tried to create for 



254 Introducing the Amejican Spirit 

me surrounded me even in mid ocean, and 
consequently you ought to be happy and 
contented. 

When we reached Washington half- 
cooked, for even your excellent provisions 
for our comfort were unavailing against your 
terrific summer heat, your friend and his 
automobile were at the station; just such 
a friend and such an automobile as met us 
dozens of times before. 

If anything, this friend was a little more 
persistent than the other species, for we 
were taken up and down and in and out, to 
everything within fifty miles of Washington. 
We shook hands with half your congress- 
men ; some of them seem to be professional 
hand-shakers, and my hand aches at the 
thought of it. 

State Secretary Bryan received me most 
affably and talked about his peace treaties. 
He didn't give me much chance to do any 
talking myself. He seems so genuinely 
American ; by that I mean simple and child- 
like in many things, and complex and diffi- 
cult to understand in others. 



The Co?nmencement and The End 255 

He is neither a humbug as some of your 
papers say, nor a prophet as he thinks him- 
self. His faith in humanity and in himself is 
pathetically colossal. 

It is amusing to find that you Americans, 
and you are the most American of them all 
— you Americans who have invented cash 
registers and time clocks, those symbols of 
unfaith in humanity, are so full of faith in 
your relation to big, national and inter- 
national problems. 

Your optimism may, after all, be due to 
your ignorance, coupled with the fact that 
you are living in a land vast and isolated, 
which has not quite exhausted its resources 
and opportunities. The most materialistic 
people on earth in your relationship to each 
other, you leap into remarkable idealism in 
the sphere of politics and diplomacy. If it is 
true that " God takes care of children and 
fools," then God is taking wonderfully good 
care of you Americans, who seem to me to 
be both. 

In our country we would put a man of 
Mr. Bryan's type in charge of an orphan 



256 hitroduciitg the American Spirit 

asylum, and feel that the children would be 
safe with him at least till their twelfth year ; 
and yet I know that he has done vigorous 
fighting, and I shall give him a chapter in 
my book about America, which as you know 
I intend to write and have already begun. 

It was quite a change of atmosphere when 
I went from the Department of State to the 
White House. The President's secretary 
seems to me a man of large calibre, kind, 
yet firm. A man to like and yet to fear ; 
just the kind of person a great man needs as 
a buffer against his friends, and as a guard 
against his enemies. The atmosphere of the 
White House is dignified, yet not cold ; 
democratic, yet reserved ; you feel that it is 
a place of power. 

Above ever}^thing else you have done for 
me I want to thank you for making it pos- 
sible for me to meet President Wilson. He 
is not at all the type of man I expected to 
find. There is nothing pedantic about him 
and I do not know a man in any of our uni- 
versities like him. He is not as easy to 
analyze as Mr. Bryan, he is by far the 



The Commencemefit and The E?id 257 

greater, more complex and stronger nature. 
He has the firmness which rulers should 
possess, and may be too unyielding when 
once he has made up his mind to anything. 
He knows more than Mr. Bryan but is not 
as dogmatic, not nearly as friendly, and yet 
I came nearer to that which I sought in him, 
and I think I understood him better. He let 
me do all the talking, but asked all man- 
ner of questions ; yet he told me more 
that way than Mr. Bryan, who did all the 
talking. 

If President Wilson is a politician, he is a 
new kind which I have never met before. I 
think he has made many mistakes, which of 
course is natural. There is only one of your 
presidents who never made mistakes, and 
that was President Roosevelt. He made 
blunders, which he had the pugnacity and 
the sheer physical courage to turn into 
political capital, and then blundered again. 

President Wilson was in the midst of the 
Mexican muddle when I saw him, vet he 
seemed to me very well poised, and bearing 
his many burdens, not like a martyr or a 



258 Introducing the American Spirit 

saint, but as a really strong man ought to 
bear them. 

Of course you do not believe that I took 
your eulogies of America ^^fur baare Mtiertze^^ 
(at their face value). There are two Americas 
and you are living in but one of them. Your 
America lies in the high altitudes of Lake 
Mohonk, Hull House, and Grinnell College. 
The other America which you tried to hide 
from me I saw, just because you tried to hide 
it. It is sorbid, base, selfish, and above all 
strong ; but that you do not seem to know. 

You have rnodijied my view of America, 
but you have not changed it. You are still a 
big experiment as a nation, and I am not 
sure that it will be a successful one. You 
have nothing to teach us in government, 
business or education. Just one thing I envy 
you — your faith in your unfinished country 
and in yourself as a force in its making. 

As you know, I do not share your faith ; 
especially do I not believe that one individual 
or many individuals can change the course of 
empires. 

You think yourself citizen, king and 



The Commencement and The End 259 

priest ; but you are merely an atom, a 
conscious atom of course, and in that and 
that alone, in that you are conscious, and 
know yourself a part of the whole and be- 
lieve yourself an effective part of it, lies hap- 
piness. I enjoyed hearing you talk about 
the x-\merican Spirit ; you talked about the 
soul of a country as if you had seen it and 
felt it and loved it. 

My dear friend, you do not know your 
own soul, nor the stuff out of which it is 
made, and yet in your American conceit you 
talk about the soul of a country. It was an 
interesting psychological study to watch you, 
and it gave me much amusement as well as 
something to think about. 

I enjoyed you most of all in your own 
little town, your college and your hospitable, 
beautiful home. I feared you would burst 
from pride and complacency as you inter- 
preted the " American Spirit" from that little 
place; a speck, and not even a well-defined 
speck, on the map of your country. 

You, a world traveller, have at last become 
a really narrow provincial, I should say a 



26 o I?itroducirig the American Spirit 

very happy one, as provincials always are. 
You wanted me to see your country through 
the June atmosphere of your Commence- 
ment ; a democratic, peaceful, rose-laden 
America. I saw it through the smoke and 
grime of Chicago, t±ie crowded tenements of 
New York, the injustice of your courts and 
the corruption of your politics. 

Yet I am glad I saw }'our America, and I 
want to thank you for your ardent endeavor 
to show it to me as you want it to be, and 
not as it is. 

My wife sends her thanks and greetings. 
She received more benefit out of her visit 
than I. I have had to promise to remodel 
the house, and put in another bathroom 
which is to be between our bedrooms. The 
new bathtub must be porcelain and we are 
to have an instantaneous heater. She still 
talks a good deal of the '' gute cornflecks " 
and '* grep frut" which we both enjoyed so 
much. Above all she remembers the courtesy 
of the men, and if the servant did not place 
her chair for her at table, I fear I should now 
have to do it. 



The Commencement and The End 261 

America certainly is a Paradise for women, 
but it is " Die Hoe lie " for men. 

Remember that when you and any of your 
family come to Berlin you are to be our 
guests. I trust you will come soon, for con- 
ditions over here look dubious, and the war, 
** der grosse Krieg^^ may come before we 
know it. 

Herzliche Gruesse von Hans zu Hans. 

Auf Wiedersehen. 



XV 

The Challenge of tlie American Spirit 

I AM sure the Herr Director will not 
object if I have the last word; for while 
he was with me that privilege was 
seldom mine and obtained only by dint of 
strategy. 

Since his departure, the great war which 
he prophesied has moved over Europe and 
hides every bit of fair and peaceful sky like a 
storm-cloud ; its thunder and destructive 
lightning fill the air, leaving scarcely a place 
safe and undisturbed. 

Not a soul is unafraid, not a heart is with- 
out pain and sorrow, and the Herr Director 
himself, although past middle age, has volun- 
teered to serve in the trenches, slippery from 
oozing blood and foul from the spattered 
brains of men. The *' fiddling, twiddling 
diplomats, the haggling, calculating mer- 
chants of Babylon, the sleek lords with their 

262 



Challenge of the American Spiiit 263 

plumes and spurs " have had their way, and 
the poor, blind, ignorant millions, made mad 
by hate, do their brutal bidding. 

We, on this safer side, who as yet have 
not loosed the dogs of war, have calculated 
the loss to Europe in the fratricidal slaughter 
of its most virile men, in the loss of its arts 
and trades, in the wreck and ruin to houses 
and homes and in the age-long poverty 
which awaits. Much counting has been 
done as to what we shall make out of this 
sure bankruptcy that is to come to the nations 
which are our competitors for the world's 
trade, and what glory shall be ours when 
New York, and not London shall be the new 
Babylon, with power to make the " Epha 
small and the Shekel great." 

With the incalculable loss to the European 
nations there has come to some of them a 
gain in national unity upon which under no 
circumstances we may count. 

It has been with no small sense of pride 
that I have demonstrated to the Herr Director 
and to others the fact that, in spite of our 
youth as a nation, and the varied national, 



264 Introducing the American Spirit 

linguistic and religious rootage of our popu- 
lation even in the Colonial period, we have 
grown to be one people. Even the constant 
inflow of new and more varied human 
material has not weakened us but indeed the 
sense of national unity has grown stronger. 
I have watched with joy the processes by 
which this alien element was becoming one 
with us, the fading away of animosities and 
inherited prejudices, and the making of a 
new people out of the world's conglomerate. 

The war has brought about a retardation 
of this process, and we shall have great 
cause for gratitude if no permanent damage 
is done to our nation's spirit, a loss for which 
no possible gain in any direction could com- 
pensate. The term *' Hyphenated Ameri- 
can," which has now come into use, if it in- 
dicates anything more than the place of a 
man's national or racial origin, and the very 
natural sympathies arising therefrom, is an 
insult to the man to whom it is applied, and 
a confession of divided allegiance, if volun- 
tarily assumed. 

It may be interesting to note that it was 



Challenge of the American Spirit 265 

His Majesty, the Emperor of Germany, who 
. repudiated the hyphen when a German- 
American delegation called on him on the 
occasion of some royal anniversary. 

When the delegation was introduced in 
this hyphenated manner, he said : *' Germans 
I know, Americans I know, but German- 
Americans I do not know." 

Although the hyphen has always existed, 
it has assumed new meaning in these troub- 
led days and is applied as a term of oppro- 
brium, largely to Americans of German 
birth ; people who have always been loyal 
to the country of their adoption, and, I think, 
are no less loyal now. 

If there has been wavering in their devo- 
tion, if the process of yielding themselves to 
the ideals and interests of this country has 
been arrested, they are not altogether to 
blame, and we ourselves are not altogether 
blameless. 

It was thoroughly in harmony with the 
American Spirit that our sympathies should 
go out to brave little Belgium, and turn from 
the ruthless conqueror who was much nearer 



266 Introducing the American Spirit 

to us culturally and in greater harmony with 
us spiritually. It was also natural for the 
German people in this country to challenge 
the evident bias of the press, and the result- 
ant prejudices arising in the minds of their 
friends and neighbors. Being German they 
knew what a German soldier is capable of 
doing, and of what atrocities he is guiltless ; 
although in the attempt to defend their peo- 
ple they in turn became as unfair as we, 
condoning every act of the Germans and be- 
smirching their enemies. 

How far this bias can carry one is illus- 
trated by the German pastor in a neighbor- 
ing town, one of the gentlest souls I know, 
who, when told of the destruction of the 
Lusitama, said: "Thanks be to God, let the 
good work go on." He will not have to 
live very long to repent of this. 

To match him I may quote a most lovable 
Quaker lady nearly ninety years of age, 
who, with a violence in striking contrast to 
the Quaker character, expressed as her dear- 
est wish that she might be permitted to kill 
the Emperor of Germany, and I am almost 



Challenge of the American Spirit 267 

sure she was not alone in that pious desire, 
even among the members of her family. 

The German press and the German pulpit 
have fanned this reawakened Germanic 
spirit, not always from lofty motives, and 
many an editor and pastor have found this 
antagonism a source of revenue and a hope 
of perpetuating their influence. 

If the American press both in its news and 
editorial columns has been painful reading 
to any one who loves fair play, it did not 
help him to turn to the German press, whose 
utterances were made more distressing by 
the fact that not infrequently they contained 
expressions bordering on treason. Had 
their editors lived in Germany and spoken 
of the Emperor in the same words which 
they applied to their President, their terms 
of imprisonment, if combined, would reach 
into eternity. 

Even after the war the attempt will be 
made to keep alive this antagonism, and if 
possible to widen the breach. It will be a 
serious challenge to our national spirit, for I 
doubt that we can maintain a vital unity un- 



268 Introducing the American Spirit 

less it represents one country, one people, 
and one language. 

I know of no way in which to meet this 
danger effectively ; but I do know that it is 
not through reprisals or punishments. Per- 
haps it is best to hope that at the close of the 
war we shall all recover our sanity. Certain 
it is that the American people have in the 
Germans in this country too valuable and 
powerful an element to alienate, and the 
German people who have made this 
country their home have too great a sense 
of the value of it and its institutions, to them 
and their children, to be willing to jeopardize 
the American Spirit, because of that which 
must be but a passing phase in the history 
of our poor, misguided, human race. 

Besides the threatened break in unity, the 
American Spirit is being challenged by a call 
to arms, not merely to avert any momentary, 
threatened danger, but to be permanently 
safeguarded, prepared against its predatory 
neighbors all around the globe. Whether 
those who join in this call know it or not, or 
wish it or not, it means militarism. When j ust 



Challenge of the American Spirit 269 

such arguments were used for Germany's 
preparedness, when that gospel was being 
preached with all possible fervor, one of the 
wisest Germans said : " Wehrkraft zvird 
immer Mehrkra/t^^ ("Defensive power al- 
ways becomes ofTensive power "), and I am 
sure that the average American will say 
that, in the case of Germany, this has proved 
true. 

If I were arguing for military preparedness, 
I would not be so insistent upon the building 
of new fortresses, or the accumulation of am- 
munition. I would insist upon training our 
children in obedience and reverence. I would 
give them schoolmasters who know what 
they teach and who would demand strict ap- 
plication to the curriculum. I would oppose 
the growing pedagogic idea that the school- 
room is a playground, and that knowledge 
may be acquired without hard work. I would 
restore the rod and banish the coddler. I 
would call in our high school boys from the 
side lines, from their vicarious athletics and 
their slavish imitation of college customs, and 
teach them how to dig trenches and serve 



270 Introducing the American Spirit 

cannon, which seem to be the chief need in 
modern military operations. 

It is folly to believe that \}ci^ fiasco of the 
Russian armies was due to the lack of ammuni- 
tion or of sufficient fortresses ; it was due to 
the lack of good schools and to the lack of 
discipline among its educated classes. 

With the decay of our pioneer spirit, which 
is inevitable, with the growth of a leisure 
class, with groups of men and women who 
know no other way to justify their existence 
than to play bridge or go to Tango teas ; 
with a large class of people less unfortunately 
situated, who have to work for their living, 
but from whom the state asks nothing in the 
way of service except the payment of taxes 
which are easily evaded, it is a great ques- 
tion how to keep our virility and how to 
foster a patriotism which may be counted 
upon in the time of national danger. I am 
fairly sure that some other way than the mili- 
taristic way ought to be found. I am not sure 
that we shall find it ; because only those who 
seek shall find. 

There are some things we may profitably 



Challenge of the American Spirit 271 

learn from Germany, and one is the main- 
tenance of a state which by its very nature 
will compel devotion. A state deeply con- 
cerned with the well-being of every individual ; 
a state which sees to it that impartial judg- 
ment shall be meted out, and that the scales do 
not tip to those who weight them with gold. 

A state which eliminates graft and is able 
to train an efficient army of public servants is 
more likely to gain and keep the loyalty of 
its citizens than one which, although tech- 
nically free, is shackled by corruption and 
graft, and which, while giving each man the 
power to become a king, places the major 
emphasis upon property rather than upon 
person. Yes, we have a great deal to do to 
be properly prepared, besides authorizing 
congress to spend millions for ** reeking tube 
and iron shard." 

What I most fear for the American Spirit 
is the loss of that which makes it really 
American and truly Spirit, the loss of its 
democracy. I am confident that the form of 
our government is not endangered, and what- 
ever military success may come to monarchic 



272 Introducing the American Spirit 

governments we shall not envy them their 
kings nor put ourselves in bondage to them. 
If this republic is still an experiment then we 
shall see the experiment through to the end 
as a republic. 

I am also sure that w^e shall work out the 
problem which confronts us in the relation- 
ship between capital and labor, and that we 
shall create here an industrial democracy. 
The dissatisfaction with the present system is 
growing daily, even among the so-called 
privileged classes, and many a man, well 
favored by circumstances, is crying out with 
Walt Whitman, '* By God ! I will not have 
anything which others cannot have on the 
same terms." 

What I most dread is, that we shall be in- 
creasingly unable to be democratic in our 
spirit, in our relation to those who are in any 
marked way differentiated from us racially. 
Our caste system is daily growing in strength, 
the social taboos are increasing in number, the 
spirit is barred from moving freely among all 
classes and races, and thus is bound to perish. 

The social boycott practiced against the 



Challenge of the American Spirit 273 

Jews, and which is even more thorough here 
than it is in Russia, may be followed by an 
economic boycott, and what has but recently 
happened in Georgia makes such occurrences 
on a larger scale not impossible. The atti- 
tude of the American people both South and 
North towards the Negro is not growing bet- 
ter, and it will take more than all the brave 
optimism of Booker T. Washington to con- 
vince me that this is not true. 

It is anything but the American Spirit 
which greets the Japanese and Chinese at 
the Pacific Coast, and the decadence of that 
spirit is daily creating for itself new victims 
for its prejudices and hates. 

It seems to be a growing conviction that 
in order to foster our racial integrity and self- 
respect we need to have contempt for other 
people and make of them a sort of mental 
cuspidore. 

I know the difficulty involved in this prob- 
lem. I believe it is the most serious chal- 
lenge which the American Spirit has to meet, 
and here and here alone I confess my doubt 
as to its ability to meet it. 



274 Introducing the American Spirit 

This is no time, though, to turn doubt into 
despair, nor is it the time for the calling of 
conventions and the organization of societies. 
It is a time, however, for the strengthening of 
our faith in one another, for renewed alle- 
giance to humanity no matter how it is en- 
cased, for a patriotism based upon something 
bigger than identity of race. It is a time for 
mutual forbearance, for the divine gift to 
see ourselves as others see us ; for a supreme 
loyalty to our country, and a determination 
stronger than death to make this country ca- 
pable of winning the loyalty of all its citizens. 

It is a time to glory in being an American 
and to become desperately sure we have 
something in which to glory. Now as never 
before should there be serious self-examina- 
tion to see whether we have not sinned 
against the Spirit. 

This is the time to accept the Challenge of 
the American Spirit and prove that we are 
loyal enough to follow its guidance. 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



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